The Jedi Purge
by Loneheart
Summary: After the destruction of the Jedi Council and before the birth of the Rebellion, the Jedi were scattered before the might of the Empire. Most were hunted down, some fell to the darkness within themselves and a few vanished without trace. This is the tale
1. Strange Allies.

**The Jedi Purge******

**Chapter One******

**Strange Allies**

The execution was a simple affair.

At noon the notices went up outside the Imperial military bases and Civilian Planetary Police stations. The spectacle itself was transmitted on global television at the command of the regional governor.

"How do you feel?"

"Shut up."

"The risk of execution is an occupational hazard for one of his convictions."

"Shut up "Jedi", or I just might turn you in as well."

"That implies you might not."

Petri spun on his left heal and backhanded the Jedi across the face. In the old days it would have been an act of bravery or stupidity. The price would have been imprisonment if not a vicious retribution on the spot. Now it only served to ease Petri's temper.

The Jedi took the blow well, rolling with it as much as the restraints would allow. When he straightened his face showed no signs of injury and his eyes no sign of anger. His captor turned and stalked away from the Imperial army base they had only just arrived at, dragging the Jedi behind him.

Petri was feeling mean. He walked quickly, each stride eating up the ground. It was too much for the Jedi to match with the restraints. They got half way down the street before Petri heard the thump of a falling body and, surprisingly, a swear word.

Kelly looked up at his captor who, surprisingly, was laughing.

"You're a Jedi? One of the great protectors of the Old Republic? Nice to know you're only human." Petri turned away with a particularly dirty chuckle.

Kelly looked up at the bounty hunter. One cheek was red where he had landed. From what he had seen of Petri he guessed that the man still had a conscience. Under the mask the bounty hunter was probably still a young man.

But impatient.

"Come on, we haven't got all day. How can one of the great Mind Knights of the Old Republic be so slow getting to his feet? Then again, maybe that's why there are so few of you left."

Kelly felt a sudden flare of anger towards this man, this mercenary who made a living out of blood money. Underneath the armour they were probably much the same. Yet while Kelly's training had made him serene Petri's experience as a bounty hunter seemed to goad him in the opposite direction. For as long as Petri had held Kelly in his power, Petri had never failed to provoke his prisoner at the slightest opportunity.

Petri dragged Kelly to his feet and Kelly considered using the opportunity to slam his tormentor against a wall. Despite the temptation, he did not. Kelly knew that he would lose any fight with his hated keeper for as long as he was kept in restraints.

They walked back to the space port because no taxi would give a lift to a bounty hunter with a prisoner. When they got there the skin on Kelly's legs was blistered from the chafing of the restraints. 

Petri hauled Kelly into the docking bay where the ship was sitting like a drunk beetle. The bay was shadowed and uncomfortably warm.

"What, ya didn't turn him in?" The speaker was Chainy, Petri's unwilling and unequal partner. "Are we going to take him some place else?"

"Shut up" replied Petri.

"Didn't they want him?" Chainy was around thirty, but always acted so nervous that he seemed much younger. Watching them both carefully, Kelly was sure that the main reason Petri never took off his mask was that he didn't want Chainy to discover which of them was older. "Hey," Chainy just didn't know when to quit, "Does this have anything to do with them executing that guy?"

"What guy?"

"The old guy. The one you handed over the Navy."

Petri grabbed the space pilot by the shirt. "What guy?"

"Nothing, forget it." quaked Chainy. The pilot raised his hands and backed off. Petri let him go and began stalking towards the ship. Chainy followed a few steps behind him.

"Only I heard ya didn't get paid for that one."

"So?"

"Well, even if ya didn't paid I figure I deserve something." Petri spun round and faced Chainy again. "I mean, I took ya between all those worlds. Without permits. I didn't even ask any questions."

"You did nothing but ask questions."

"But ya never answered." Petri advanced on Chainy, who backed into a wall. 

"As I understood it," Petri observed, "my part of this deal was that I wouldn't turn you in. The Solars still want you for smuggling."

"I swear I'm innocent."

"I'd say you got the best of the deal." Petri turned away from the smuggler. "Anyway," he snarled over one shoulder, "since when where you ever innocent of a smuggling charge?"

"Since I went to Mentilental. The local Solars..." But the conversation had drifted beyond the range of Kelly's enhanced senses.

The young man gazed around the docking bay. Over in the corner the diminutive figure of Chainy's engineer was working on something complicated.

Mos Eisley was a small creature, but Chainy treated him with reverence, rather than the nervous respect he conferred on nearly everyone else. That alone was enough to win Kelly's interest. Petri, on the other hand, treated Mos with the discourtesy he handed out to all beings less powerful that himself.

For his part Mos contented himself with playing with the complex engines on the "Stag Party". He had a quiet contempt for anyone who couldn't repair a hyperdrive while blindfolded and a barely hidden mistrust for human kind in general; including Chainy.

"I've had enough of this. You can find your own ship." The outburst from Chainy was startling. Kelly turned in amazement.

"Do you really think you have any say in this?" Petri demanded in angry disbelief. He had Chainy up against one of the ship's support legs. "Are you really that dumb? Get the ship ready to take off." Petri turned and walked away, leaving a humiliated Chainy behind. "You don't go anywhere." he ordered Kelly as he passed on the way out.

Chainy stood next to Kelly, staring after the bounty hunter. "You know," he told the would be Jedi, "I'm tempted to just take off without him."

"I don't blame you. Don't though. He's regretting something for the first time in his life." 

"Strife! You're the last person I'd expect to make excuses for him."

Kelly looked after the departed bounty hunter with a pained look about his eyes. "I could easily have turned out a lot like him." he explained.

"You could turn out a lot like Gamma." Kelly looked up at the mention of the recently executed man's name.

"I don't think it'll come to that."

"From what I've seen ya mostly okay. Why don't ya come with us? Moss could probably get those", he gestured to the restraints, "off, no trouble at all." 

"He would only report us to the Solars." Kelly looked up, a sudden interest burning in his eyes. "I'll take that offer about the restraints, though."

Mos had a habit of keeping his distance during arguments, now he took the center stage. He sat cross legged on top of the strange repulsor lift droid that served him as a platform.

"Tricky." He remarked in a high, rough voice. "Best to leave it until I've got the right tool. And the plans to this type of lock."

Without a sound Mos returned to his earlier work. Behind him Kelly hung his head in disappointment.

"Aw, don't take it so hard." advised Chainy. "He won't keep ya in those things forever."

"No." agreed Kelly. "They'll take them off when he hands me over to the Solars. So he can slap them other poor... Forget it. It's not your fault, and you can't do anything about it."

Chainy left the younger man alone out of sympathy. He joined his Jawa engineer at one of the work benches, where a vital part of the ship's hyperspace drive was undergoing repair.

"How come you wouldn't open the handcuffs?"

Delicate hands froze over their work and then started to slowly fumble with the tools they were holding. It gave Mos time to think.

"I've seen ya fix things like that. For a wager over a round of drinks. And I don't mean early in the evening, neither."

"Now didn't seem like a good time. Besides; even if Petri isn't the safest company, he has those things on our friend there for a reason." 

Chainy nodded to himself. It sounded fair enough, and if that was the way Mos wanted it, that was the way it would be.

Kelly had been listening to their conversation with his force improved hearing, mostly because he had nothing better to do. Suddenly there was a deafening crash. Covering his ears with his hands, he looked up from the landing support that Petri had chained him to.

Smoke hung around the entrance to the docking bay. A second blast caught the floor about midway between the ship and the door. Smoke curled towards the ceiling from the tiny creator in the landing platform.

Kelly gaped towards the open blast doors in amazement. Repeated blasts sounded from outside the bay. As the red tracery flickered back and forth outside the bay, Chainy shook off the paralysis of surprise and ran to the ship. Only as he passed did Kelly wonder weather they would take off with him still chained to the landing gear.

The noise outside paused, as though to catch it's breath. Kelly looked desperately to the engineer, Mos, in the hope he could persuade the tiny creature to release him.

The Jawa was at the blast door. 

Mos stretched tall on his droid platform. The control for the bay doors was in his grasp. With a twist of his nimble fingers the heavy blast doors began to slide close. Petri slipped between the monolithic slabs a shear second before they came together, forming a seamless wall. 

"Get away from there!" Petri yelled at Mos. 

Mos barely had time to fall backwards from the door control before it exploded in a shower of sparks. Petri fired a second time to make sure the blast doors would stay shut and ran for the ship.

He met Chainy coming the other way.

"It's no good." Chainy told him. "The drive's in pieces."

Both men looked to the engineer.

"Did you have to take the engines to bits today?" demanded Petri.

"Routine maintenance. Want drive failure in space?" Mos snapped back; his vocabulary suffering under stress.

"Right now I'd settle for taking the risk." Chainy told him. "How long?"

"Half an hour. Sub-light's okay. It's just hyperspace motivator on workbench."

Petri looked to the blast doors. They wouldn't hold for long. The ground hogs were probably already working on them. From behind him the engines, minus their powerful hyperspace drive, began a high pitched whining.

Chainy appeared in the ship's doorway. "I've started the warm up sequence. All we need is somewhere to go." he told them.

"Then we go." Petri started for the inside of the ship.

"No, no." Chainy blocked his way, hands raised in supplication. "If we just take off we could find anything up to a star destroyer waiting for us. Mos, get the sensors running. Find out what's up there."

"Er, while we're waiting." Kelly rattled the restraints.

"You'd better un-chain him. What ever we do, we can't very well leave him there."

Petri growled at the pilot; he didn't like letting Chainy run the show, but the ex-smuggler experience left him little choice. Pulling the key from his pocket, Petri undid the restraint that held Kelly to the ship.

Mos met them half way into the ship. "No good." he announced. "Two customs ships orbit, another down here."

Petri looked to the smuggler. Chainy was running a hand through his tangled hair. His expression was one of despair.

"There's no way we can get past two guard ships, never mind three."

"Is there any way we can take two down?" Petri asked.

"You've got to be kidding."

"Those things are armoured, shielded..." put in Mos.

"And even if we could we'd end up with the navy on our backs. Never mind every bounty hunter that can read a wanted bulletin."

"I have a solution." All eyes turned to the Jedi.

Kelly held out the restraints and shook them to make his point. His audience exchanged debating looks. Finally, as an ominous noise came from the blast doors, Chainy nudged Petri in the side.

"Well go on then. Not like ya going to get a chance to turn 'im in now."

Reluctantly Petri held out the key and undid the security cuffs. The Jedi held out one hand, ready to receive something.

"My light-sabre." he prompted.

Petri gritted his teeth. "After you tell us your plan." he tautly replied.

Kelly nodded to the "Stag Party". "Your ship has robot pilot?" he asked Chainy.

"Yeah."

Kelly smiled.

*

The heavy hyper-alloy of the blast doors weighed tons. The circuitry that controlled the powerful hydraulic rams had been roasted. Without it opening and closing the doors meant a lengthy repair job.

When the doors finally started to slide open the planetary police already knew that it was too late. Their com-links were buzzing with the news of the Stag Party's illegal take off. Through the shield doors they hadn't heard a thing.

The crew on the "Honest Truth" had not expected the "Stag Party" to make a fight of it. When the smuggler lifted out of the space port they were surprised, but not unready.

As the captain called for the Stag Party to surrender the second in command noted that the smuggler had it's shields up. He warned the tractor-beam crews that the target would be "slippery"; he warned the captain that the smuggler might have hidden weapons.

The Party curled upwards in a clumsy attempt to avoid the waiting guard ship.

The Truth's tractor beams locked onto the fleeing ship. The energy beams struggled, fighting the shields for a hold.

As the battle began the Party's drives flared. Truth's tractor beams grappled with the smaller ship, the beams twisting to follow their target.

The Party gained distance, the beam gunner fearing that he would lose the target altogether if he tried to match the awesome kick of the ship's engines.

His ploy was to no avail.

Part of Truth's hull obscured one of the tractor beams. Automatic safety systems cut in, preventing the tractor gun from tearing loose of it's mount.

The second tractor followed the Party round as it soared above the Truth. It's grasp on the ship failed thanks to the powerful deflector shields.

There are good reasons why it's illegal to open up with a sub-light drive in an atmosphere. Even with the right suppressers the electromagnetic noise from the drive is enough scramble communications, sensors and computers.

The waste particles that the drive emits combine, producing noticeable radioactivity. The best reason is that a sub-light drive can move a ship fast enough to burn up with atmospheric friction. The shock waves of such a thing could flatten small buildings.

Though the ship had escaped the first of the security cruisers, it was out of control.

The shields barely held back the wall of superheated air, a second's weakness and the ship would be flayed. The hull would buckle under an immense pressure of the ship's own making.

As the Party hammered it's way through the sky like a rising comet, the two waiting cruisers charged their weapons. They spread out to compensate for their target's unpredictable course.

Close behind the beleaguered ship was the "Honest Truth", working in overdrive to make up for it's earlier failure. Between the three cruisers there would be no escape.

The Party never even hesitated in it's uncontrolled rush for the freedom of space. Under the battering of the atmosphere it found itself directly before one of the cruisers. The cruiser fired even as it twisted out of the on-rushing ship's path.

The "Stag Party" took the blast head on, as pure light tearing through the feeble remains of the energy shields. It punched a hole in the side of the ship, but that wasn't enough to stop the vessel's desperate bid for freedom.

Without slowing the crippled ship plunged out of the planetary air envelope. By sheer fluke the Stag Party's escape became a real possibility.

The commander of the Cyclone, the only ship that the Stag Party had not engaged, was having none of it. Sub-light engines blazing, the cruiser quickly chased down the small freighter.

Cyclone's ventricle and dorsal blaster cannons flashed terribly and the Stag Party's engines fell dead.

Within moments the two other cruisers were upon the hapless fugitive, but by that time it no longer mattered.

*

The circus in the docking bay below had almost wound up. With the Stag Party's departure there was little for the police to examine or even see.

The news that the ship had been captured finally wound things up. The men idling around the empty bay left the door as it was and headed back for headquarters. The only thing that they left behind to guard the crime site was a yellow cordon tape and a tiny camera-recorder.

Petri threw back the hatch on the garbage can. Chainy had wailed at the thought of losing the ship, but Petri had left him no choice. Let Kelly sooth the smuggler if he thought it important.

Behind the bounty hunter Mos's repulsor lift platform hummed into life. The tiny Jawa rose out of the garbage can, his glowing eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

The bounty hunter crossed the room as Kelly helped Chainy out of the garbage. Mos drifted after him, but his eyes were on the Jedi and the pilot. Would Chainy be needing an engineer, now that his ship was gone?

"You can't leave." Kelly yelled after Petri.

The bounty hunter stopped and turned to listen. Progress, thought Kelly.

"Damn right you can't." put in Chainy. "What about my ship?"

"If you just walk out someone will report you and we'll be back were we started."

Petri seemed to mull this over before agreeing with it. He shook his head as though trying to shake off exhaustion. "How do we get out of here without being seen?"

Kelly was already looking at the garbage cans that had hidden them so far.

"How do they move those things out of here?"

"They use robo-loaders. Same kind that unload ships." replied Chainy.

"Can we get one in here?" 

"Sure, just use the terminal. But the deck officer might get suspicious if looks at the docking bay number." 

"Supposing we asked it to be delivered next door? We could intercept it." 

"Robot loaders aren't that smart. I doubt we could persuade it." 

"No problem." the humans turned to the Jawa, who was posing smugly on the repulsor-lift droid. Kelly shrugged. Chainy seemed pleased. Only Petri was less than satisfied. Mos cocked an eye at the bounty hunter, who explained what was worrying him. 

"You're pretty distinctive. You step out there - I think we're going to get noticed." 

"I'll send the droid. It can handle this." Mos bowed and spoke to the platform droid in his own language. The droid sank and Mos hopped to the ground. He sent the droid on it's way, knowing that he was in safe hands. 

The droid had been the first thing Mos put together after leaving Tatooine. It was the best thing that could happen to someone living in a world of giants. It put him on their own level, literally. Without it he would spend his days getting elbows in the eye and being treated like a child. Mos looked after it, hoping that everything would be alright. Without it he wouldn't be able to reach door switches.

The loading droid arrived ten minutes later, with the platform droid in close attendance. 

Mos breathed a sigh of relief and Petri put his gun away. Chainy put their feelings into words: "Well, I guess we made it. We out smarted them."


	2. Choose Your Friends Carefully - Your Ene...

**The Jedi Purge******

**Chapter Two**

**Choose your friends carefully – Your enemies more so…**

The local news channels had a twenty second item on the antics at the space port.

It screamed at the recklessness of the fugitives at opening up the sub-light drives. There were a pointless eight seconds on the principals of the sub-light drives, the way un-consumed quarks came together to form protons and neutrons. 

The only good news for the group of four was the fact that the Solars were reluctant to admit failure. They were withholding the news of their quarry's escape, hoping that the media would loose interest. When the storm blew over there would be an announcement. 

Would the public look out for this man? and this man? and so on... report them to the planetary police if you should happen to see them, you will be rewarded; thank you. 

Until then they would have to avoid the police, but only the police. 

They had found sanctuary in a grubby motel. It wasn't much, but it was exactly the type of place where no one would report them, and the police wouldn't look until they had to. 

Here in a filthy room with bald concrete walls, they gathered. The four of them sat around a ruined table discussing their strategy. 

Petri thought they would stand a better chance if they split up. 

Mos and Kelly disagreed.

Chainy thought that they should find away to get off world before they discussed splitting up. 

Petri was on the point of just walking out when Kelly asked how he intended to get off the planet. 

"Chainy's not the only smuggler on the planet." Petri told him. 

"He may be the only one you can trust."       

"Without a ship he's not much use, whether I trust him or not."

"Let him go, he's no use to us." put in Chainy, who resented being called useless. Kelly ignored him.

"I don't think you'll find it as easy to charter a flight as you think." Kelly had the bounty hunter's attention. "We left someone with egg on their face back there. They, whoever they are, will have to admit that we escaped. Eventually. They've probably already had their boss jumping all over their face for this morning's fiasco. 

"Now, suppose that boss lets this, this butterfingers try and redeem himself. He knows that there will be a thorough, desperate, search. 

"We've already given them the slip once. There was no reason why their first trap shouldn't have caged us, so Boss will probably think that there's a good chance of us staying free. We've certainly got more of a chance now than we had a few hours back. 

"If Butterfingers catches us, then Boss has someone who owes him big time. If we get away, then the Boss has a fall guy for both the botched search and the space-port. Taking over the search can only make him seem as incompetent as his underling."

Three pairs of eyes stared at him, soundlessly. Then, Mos broke the silence: "Butterfingers?"

"Poor catcher." Chainy explained.

"You still have to explain why we shouldn't split up."

"Any search for us now is going to be desperate. They have no idea where we are this moment, so they're going to go mad trying to run down every smuggler on the planet. They know we can't stay here, and they have our ship."

Petri pulled away his helmet, startling Chainy with his youthful appearance. Kelly smiled, thinking that Petri looked like a choir boy gone to the dark side of the Force. The young bounty hunter scratched thoughtfully at the stubble that had gone unchecked for the last few days. "Security at the space port will be stepped up to stop us from stealing a ship." he said.   

Mos twisted his fingers in annoyance. Stealing a ship was to have been his suggestion.      

"You can bet that there's not a smuggler on the planet it's safe for us to go to. The places they hang out are probably under surveillance."

"We can't just sit here." stressed Chainy.

Kelly looked to the smuggler and the bounty hunter. "Isn't there anyone either of you could go to?"

"Everyone I'm on speaking terms with is a bounty hunter or hangs out around bounty hunters."

Chainy remained silent for a moment, glancing from friend to friend. "Karo-Than." he announced after a moment. 

"Who?" asked Kelly.

"Local crime lord. Crime lady, I should say." Petri told him. The bounty hunter looked distinctly displeased by the pilot's suggestion.

"Does she owe you a favour?" Kelly asked.

"No, but she runs most of the smuggling out of here. This search for us must be hitting her hard." Chainy thought it over for a second, while the others looked dubious. "Even so," the ex-smuggler continued, "I don't think that she'll help us for nothing."

*

Midnight was not the lonely, silent time it was made out to be. Party goers wandered through the streets, lights blazing around them. 

Petri, Kelly and Chainy were quickly absorbed into the sea of beautiful faces and bodies. All who saw them quickly forgot them. Moss, the most distinctive of them, had elected to stay in his room. His interests would be looked after by Chainy in the evening's negotiations. 

Petri had spent the hour before twilight applying a fresh coat of paint to his now unrecognisable armour. The helmet he had left behind, and he walked a little away from Kelly and Chainy.

Karo-Than was a shadowy figure, even by the standards of the underworld. Little was known of her, other than what she allowed to be known.

She was a Twi-Lek, with olive green skin and skull-tails running halfway down her spine. Her graceful, willow-like limbs often decived the on-looker into underestimating their sinuous strength. Strength the rumour-mill said had been put to lethal use in the name of self defence.

Her nightclub was a concrete dome four stories high. The entrance was a semi-circle four meters wide, with steps leading down into a tunnel. 

Petri made for the steps, but he found his way blocked by a man built like a wall. Tall and wide. 

"No weapons." the doorman said.

Petri squared up to the bouncer, but before he could do any serious good Chainy wedged himself between them. Kelly laid an unwelcome, soothing hand on the bounty hunter's shoulder.

"He's had a bad day." Chainy excused to the doorman. "He's looking to unwind."

Chainy nodded to the others and handed over his Hawkeye point four. The weapon was squat and ugly. It seemed to be made of cheap cream plastic and chrome alloy. 

Petri snarled at the doorman as he handed over his Killpower point five. 

Kelly claimed poverty, saying that he couldn't afford the permit for blaster. That drew a smile from the bouncer, who ran a sensor pack over him. 

As his friends tensed, Kelly picked out the location of the doorman's hidden weapons and assessed the girl at the counder as a possible threat. He raised his eyebrows resignedly. He noted the sensor pack was top of the line. 

The sensor pack failed to detect the light-saber. 

The three descended the short flight of steps and entered the tunnel. Amber lights gave everything a brownish tinge.

Despite their instincts, the three men found them selves walking together in a tight group. Kelly led them, reaching ahead with the force. He sensed beings ahead, humans and many things that were not human, yet were here for the same reasons. 

Behind Kelly, Petri nudged Chainy to get his attention. With a gesture he showed the pilot the eye level camera on the end wall. 

"Feeds to a wall screen in the public bar. Just so none of the patrons gets a surprise visit." Chainy mumbled.

Petri nodded. There would be a back exit as well, no doubt. Blaster fights on the premises would be costly for the management. 

They entered the public chamber, which was filled with the sounds and smells of chemical entertainment. The room was shaped like a key hole, a circle with a triangle sticking out of one side. The furthest wall to the right, the base of the triangle, had the bar counter against it. The neer circular wall was lined with booths that were too shrouded in shaddow to tell whether or not they wee occupied. 

A huge blue creature rose from an open, square table on their right. It was clearly worse for whatever it had taken, and swayed uncertainly as it approached them. 

"You, bounty hunter." it vocalised clumsily. 

Petri felt dangerous, hostile eyes turn on him. The creature was big, two legged and with in easy reach. 

"You're drunk!" Petri exclaimed, taking a step forward. He planted both palms on the creature's chest and pushed hard enough to unbalance it.

The blue being crashed against the side of the table, a free arm knocking it's original chair away. The blue creature tried to stand. 

With a swift, fluid motion Petri plucked a bottle off the table and sent it base first into the alien's head. The alien crashed back to the floor. 

Petri began to sweat. This was getting messy. If he couldn't end it soon, someone would get hurt. 

The blue creature tried to stand a second time, it's face twisted. Then a reassuring hand came down on it's shoulder, restraining it. 

Petri nodded to the sober being that sat behind the blue creature, a silent gesture of thanks. 

Chainy passed the table, headed for the bar. He was known here. A little talk with the right people would soon sort things out. 

"Captain Chainy. You will come with us."     

Chainy's eyes snapped forward, away from the trouble-makers. 

The speaker was a tall black man; Chainy recognised him from his last time at Karo-Than's place, but couldn't put a name to him.           

Flanking him to the left and right were two goliath-like gaurds. They held their energy pikes with the practised confidence of veterans. At their hips were blaster carbines of military grade.     

Chainy wasn't reassured when he heard Kelly and Petri step up on either side of him, matching the positions of the two gaurds. He had seen what these gaurds could do, and he didn't fancy their chances in a face-off.         

"I want to talk to Karo-Than." Chainy forced the words out through a sudenly dry mouth. The black man nodded, his expression changeless.  

Chainy hoped that ment he was being summoned to the meeting he wanted. Given the circumstances he ddn't have much choice.           

He waved to his two companions. "What about them?"    

"They may stay and enjoy the entertainments provided." Or not if they so chose, the man seemed to imply.    

Abruptly the man turned and strode past his two gaurds. They remained, towering over Chainy. Slowly, reluctantly, Chainy followed the messenger.       

Like a lamb to the slaughter, thought Petri.    

If Kelly had any reservations about the smuggler's course, he didn't give them form.          

Chainy was lead through a doorway that stood opposite to the one the party had entered by. The doorway slid shut behind the gaurds, who took up sentry positions.           

The space pilot looked back at them, noting that they were nearly invisible in the gloom of the corridor. The sounds of his guides footsteps grew distant. Chainy turned and hurried after him.       

He hadn't gone far when he realised he had lost his guide. With difficulty Chainy peered forward into the darkness. When the voice slipped through the air like a knife into his back, it was all he could do not to scream.        

"Welcome, Captain Chainy."     

Chainy spun before he recognised the smooth, feminine tones. Looking back he realised he had missed a small branching in the hallway.       

She stood quietly in the darkness, waiting for him to get a grip on himself. As though to give him time, she continued the thought: "Though I hear you're a Captain without a ship now."       

"Yes." He agreed.  

Karo-Than took a step forward, into the partial light of the larger corridor.     

"The security clamp down has crippled my shipping opperations. Can you tell me why you expect to be welcomed here?" 

Chainy struggled to get his mouth working again. "It's in your interests to be rid of us." he said.  

"Yes." Karo-Than seemed saddened to admit it.     

Two gaurds followed her out into the hall with Chainy. They held their weapons in a way that made the first two gaurds look like raw recruits, hiding behind training pikes.   

Chainy tried again. "We want to get off the planet. Your business interests are harmed as long as the security forces are searching for us.         

"The police could take months to decide we've escaped, or to catch us. Unless you help them.   

"But you can't do that because there are four of us, and if you betray us the fourth one will make sure everyone knows about it.   

"In the long term that will cause you more damage than the security clamp down."   

"I can't encourage the kind of antics you pulled at the spaceport by bailing you out either. Others might expect the same treatment." Karo-Than warned him.   

"You could distance yourself from our escape. We'd make it clear that we had slipped past the net. The siege would be lifted."    

The crime lady seemed to consider his reasoning. "That's what I liked about you." She said at length. "You always considered all the angles before you leaped."   

Her use of the past tense sent chills down Chainy's back. His breath hitched and his heart was in his desert dry mouth. He fought for control.        

"All I'm asking is that you loan us some money and give us the name of a ship that's for sale. We'll do the rest."       

Karo-Than became statue like. When she lifted her eyes she seemed to have hope again.    

Hope for him?       

He didn't speculate.         

"How much money?" she asked.         

"Six thousand."     

"Chicken feed."     

"Each."        

"You realise that people who are facing a life sentence on Hadyon are very poor risks... but then, if I turned a profit on all such deals people would call me a loan shark."     

Karo-Than turned away. Despite the poor light Chainy could see from her heel to the cheek of her derriere, all seductively revealed by the daring slit of her dress.    

"Come with me." she said. "We need to discuss this further."     

He followed her without question.                 

*

Petri and Kelly sat in silence, waiting for their companion to return. They were at an open table. Everyone already knew where they were, so a private booth would be little more than a trap if trouble started.      

At first they had been approached by prostitutes; a blonde and a brunette, when they were turned away a young man offered his services.      

Then conversations around them had died down for fear that they were eavesdropping. They weren't talking themselves, what else could they be doing?       

Petri was brooding over the missing Chainy, and his chances of escaping the Imperial net.           

His right hand fondled the butt of his Streetmaster point three three. It's squat, thumb-like barrel could only hold full focus for ten meters, but if trouble started that would be all he needed. 

He hadn't liked the way Chainy had just been marched away, or the fact that no one seemed to care about them.       

He wasn't surprised when he saw the three men making their way towards them across the crowded room.     

His grip on the blaster tightened.         

His eyes risked the time it took to look across the table, at the Jedi. No help there, the fool had his eyes closed.        

Kelly was meditating. His eyes were closed and his hands lay loosely folded on his lap.     

He could feel Petri playing with the blaster and the suspicion at the neighbouring tables. He knew when Petri's eyes turned to him, and the crowds parted to make way for someone or something as it moved across the room.      

When he noticed Petri's attention settle in the same direction he reached out with his senses. Three men. Big. Focused on them. Felt like they could be real trouble in a fight.

Perhaps he should open his eyes...

The smallest of the men, who was still taller than Petri, towered over their table. Kelly could feel the man reaching for something in a hidden pocket. With his magnified senses he heard the click of Petri pulling back the safety on his back-up piece, and knew that the bounty hunter had seen the gesture. 

"Captain Chainy will be negotiating terms with Mistress Karo-Than for the rest of the night." the major-domo announced. "He directed that this money should be turned over to you. Karo-Than expects your repayments to be prompt. 

"I am also to give you a name. The name is Mendez, docking bay sixty one at the west side spaceport."

Two bundles of money landed on the table, between the Jedi and the bounty hunter. Kelly opened his eyes, serenely. Petri's eyes bugged.

What the hell goes on here, wondered the bounty hunter? Did Chainy actually work something out? 

Realising that the presence of such wealth was attracting the wrong kind of attention, Petri spirited the bundle of money away. As he did so he weighed it in his hands, trying to gauge it's worth. About five thousand, he thought. Between four and eight, certainly. 

Glancing across at Kelly, he saw the other bundle of credit notes had disappeared. He could only hope that Kelly had done the disappearing. While his eyes were on the Jedi the majordomo turned and stalked away.      The upper levels of Karo-Than's dome were a mystery. Popular rumour had them as everything from a dungeon to a starfighter hanger. In fact they were a luxuriant mansion. 

Chainy entered the chamber with the confidence of someone who already had what he wanted. Anything he got now would be a bonus.

The room was square and five meters across. The walls were bare concrete, the furnishings unbelievably refined. 

On one wall was a depth screen, the most advanced type outside the galactic core. It was surrounded by a white granite frame, carved in three layers of exquisite detail. 

Chainy knew that he was looking at the highest levels of art and technology combined. It didn't surprise him in the least that Karo-Than would decorate her mansion with such treasures. He had seen the inside of her starship, the Crystal Dome, four years ago. 

There, as here, she had brought together possessions unlike anything he had seen elsewhere. 

Everything was in the gray area where Chainy could recognise the quality, but never dream of ownership. He looked across the room, taking in the splendour with almost hungry eyes,... and froze when he came to the bed. 

It was a magnificent bed. Repulsor cushions. Built in sonic masseur. Hypnotic sleep/dream inducer. The frame was wooden, made from an oil-fruit tree. 

Magnificent. But it didn't change the fact that he was in her bedroom. 

"When you left my employ I learned that it was because you had heard rumours that I was... infatuated with you.

"Normally I couldn't care less about idle gossip,... but your reaction was... insulting." Than's eyes were intense, penetrating. 

Chainy had been around, had shared affection on a dozen worlds with a hundred women. For love. For money. For the hell of it. This was something that left him cold.

Some people would do anything for kicks, others would do anything for money - but he wasn't one of them. Karo-Than was beautiful, but he always stuck to his own species.

"Look, I didn't mean to offend you..." He began.

"You can apologise later;... when I'll be more inclined to forgive you."

He felt his stomach shrink as she came towards him. His mouth was dry again. She smiled and he saw that every tooth was canine. 

"I'm not inclined... I try not to get involved with business contacts." 

"Do you think me any less professional?" she enquired coldly. "It's been two years since you worked for me, and I haven't loaned you any money yet." 

Chainy's thoughts became confused, cascading over each other in their hurry to be heard. 

She was trying to turn him into a cheep hooker. Worse. She expected him to return the fee with interest. 

Karo-Than was closer now than Chainy remembered her ever being. How very human her body was! 

Maybe it was like she said. Just a loan. He didn't owe her anything yet. 

She kissed him. Suddenly his mouth wasn't dry any more. 

He kissed back.     

The money had drawn attention like iron filings to a magnet. 

Petri wasn't bothered. 

He'd sized up the competition already, and no one would try anything here. Not while they were under Karo-Than's roof. 

It was just as well. There were dangerous people in the place tonight. Petri could have picked up sixteen thousand from the bounties on two faces alone. 

Niros Keems and Douglas Cove. 

They were there separately; Keems in his stylish clothes, Cove in heavy armour. Each had his back to a wall; but while Cove had a Slayer carbine strapped to his thigh, Keems had a tiwn barrel hold-out blaster, crammed into his sleave.

Neither would start anything tonight. 

Cove was on retainer to Karo-Than, and wouldn't dream of risking his nice, soft position. 

Keems was looking to enjoy himself, and never did anything he hadn't planed three months in advance.

The real danger was the chance a cheep punk would follow them when they left. Petri could hold his own against, maybe four of those. 

Unless they started shooting first. 

That was why Petri wanted to leave when the majordomo delivered the cash. He had two reasons for waiting. 

Firstly, with no contacts, no plan and a security alert on for him he wasn't sure he could get off the planet, with or without eight thousand credits. 

Secondly, he had to know whether Chainy was safe. It was the only way to be sure no one was coming after him. 

"Honoured,... sirs." 

The voice came from behind Petri. It had a whispering quality, and a harsh, electric undertone. He turned.

"There are police in the area."

The voice came from a droid, about two feet wide and three feet tall. Petri hadn't seen it enter the room, which was odd; he was keeping an eye on all the ways in. 

"My colleagues are warning the other patrons. It would be convenient if you left via the door opposite the entrance."

By pure reflex he looked to where Meeks and Cove were sitting. Meeks was already gone, had left while his attention was on the droid. Petri hoped that Meeks had noticed he was being watched, and had snuck out just to prove that he was worth his reputation.           

Cove was still seated. Drink in one hand, the other caressing the butt of his Slayer carbine. Petri hoped to hell Cove wasn't going to choose tonight to go out in a blaze of laser-light and glory.         

Petri didn't want to think that Meeks habitually moved with the silence of a ninja, or that Cove was as sentimental as rumour said his old age was making him. 

He looked back to the droid, which hung in mid air as though it had to catch it's breath before it could fall.     

When they were in the private corridor Petri asked the droid about Captain Chainy. They were told that the Captain was with mistress Karo-Than, and would return to them in the morning.    

Petri heard the Jedi surpress a laugh, he looked round in surprise. A second later the implications filtered through to him and he filed it away for later use.        

He was being slow tonight.        

Why else should a space tramp like Chainy think he could come here for help? He had been freelance for two years and nothing special to before that.      

As he followed Kelly down a flight of hidden steps Petri wondered how he could have been slipping so much.         

First he hadn't turned the Jedi in when he had the chance. Then there was the pointless fire fight with the police, at the spaceport. Sure, the sergeant had said they were on the way to pick up Chainy; that if Petri had a prisoner on the ship he could kiss his bounty goodbye. But that didn't merit a pitched battle and a price on his head.           

Today he had missed the reason for Chainy's visit, the arrival of the droid and Keems slipping past him. And those were just the things he knew he'd missed.      

The tunnel came up in a building across the street. It's front door faced away from Karo-Than's dome.           

"Do you think she'll give Chainy Mos's share of the money?" Kelly asked as they stepped into the street.        

"I think she'll give him something, alright." Petri replied, watching for Kelly's reaction.        

"Yes."         

Nothing. Goddamn poker-face. Either the Jedi had got use to the idea or he'd been thinking the same thing himself.   

They headed back the hotel, keeping at least forty feet between them. As a pair they could jog someone's memory. And then they waited for Chainy to return.


	3. Hide and Seek.

**The Jedi Purge******

**Chapter Three******

**Hide and seek**

Chainy felt the air's cold embrace against his skin.

It matched hers. 

Karo-Than's blood was colder than his, but her actions didn't show it.

He touched the boneless, featureless arms that grew from the back of her skull - like hair. His hands flinched away, as though frightened by the difference between them. 

Her alieness.

He was amazed she knew so much of human anatomy. Her hands ran over his back, finding places that sent shockwaves down his spine. The pleasure of her touch was like frozen bourbon. Intoxicating; refreshing.

Every moment she would do something new, surprising him. Yet when he was on the verge of surrendering he would strike upon some inhuman element in her being, and he would try to pull away. 

His shirt lay on the floor, half way between the bed and the wall where she had first kissed him. He had no memory of removing it, but somehow that didn't surprise him. 

He lay back on the bed, his head pounding. Than knelt over him, her legs folded to the left and right of his chest. His hands held her thighs, trembling from the wieght of his inhibition.

And then, abruptly, as though his world had been censored, he was alone on the bed. He still felt the cold touch of the air and the hot breath of desire; but the breath was his own and the air was empty of promise or delight. 

He sat up. 

Karo-Than was standing behind the bed, staring into the depth screen. He realised that she hadn't surrendered an iota of clothing. Where his body had divulged intimate secrets, hers was still a mystery. 

"What are you doing over there?" he asked. 

She looked over her shoulder at him. "There's been an alarm. It's more important."

"You've got people who can deal with it."

"Yes. But I have to make sure."

Chainy tried to remember if he'd ever treated a woman this way. Finally he remembered a blonde waitress he'd charmed on Vandisse. He'd been tipped off about a raid - seconds before joining her beneath the sheets. He'd dressed without apology; she'd thrown a pillow at him. 

Perhaps he should follow her example. 

"Police." Karo-Than told him. "They'll surround the place and demand to see everything."

"You've got a way out, right?"

"Yes. Your friends have left."

Chainy pulled on his clothes. He didn't fasten anything. He just got up and walked out. He was on the stairs when she caught him by the arm.

"Don't go." 

He smiled. Before he could make a fool out of himself, or ask if her priorities had changed, she added: "They were at the door when I was warned. They'll be all over the ground floor by now."

Suddenly Chainy was afraid, and his face showed it. "Will they come up here?"

"Maybe. They need special permission for private addresses worth over a hundred thousand."

"But..."

"The ground level is a business and open to the public, but it's also registered as a seperate address. I even pay taxes on it. 

"It adds up to a fair bit extra, but it's worth it to keep them out."

She watched him dress with a smile, like a connoisseur reading the label on a bottle of fine wine. "I ought to be there." she said. "Hang on and I'll be back."

The doorman flashed a predatory smile. He knew what he liked and he like what he saw; four of the most supple, youngest legs of the night. They were walking past him under pert, lean behinds. 

"Forget it, Freddie. Tonight's a school night." The doorman looked over his shoulder, glaring at the girl behind the property counter.

"Been a long time since you had to worry about homework, Tilly." He observed.

"Know how many blasters I got back here, Freddie?" Freddie turned back to the street, smirking.

One of the blonds smiled at him; he felt a rush of pride and desire. Then the second girl whispered into the smiling girl's ear, and they both giggled.

Freddie felt a twinge of fear. Were they laughing at him? He couldn't allow such a thought; they were just easily embarrassed.

He was puffing out his chest when it happened.

Huge and dangerous, it fell out of the sky like the silver grey head of a sledgehammer. Blinding light stormed over the doorman, like a nuclear tidal wave.

Blind, stunned and deaf from a sound that left his skin tingling, Freddie lay on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. When his eyes started working, policemen were charging past.

Two of them broke off from the squad, as one dragged Freddie to his feet the other covered him with a blaster carbine. Together they marched him up the stairs, to the front of Karo-Than's club.

Two figures waited in front of the police transport, casting long black shadows. Shadows like fangs. 

One of the figures, it's hair glowing from the searing light of the transport, stepped forward. 

It's face was shadowed, swathed in darkness; but Freddie had a fealing that when it's expression was revealed, that too would be dark. Karo-Than stepped into the private corridor. Her movements were rapid, but no less graceful. To her left and right gaurds fell into place. 

She entered the public bar only moments after the police troopers. With cool detachment, she noticed the way the closest man covered her. No one else showed a flicker of movement, or took their aim off their assigned line of fire.

"Who is in charge here?" she demanded.

"I am."

Karo-Than's glare snapped to the speaker. He was standing in the entrance to the bar. Behind him was a young woman and the doorman, Fredrick. For a second, she transferred her glare to him. 

The man in charge raised a hand towards her, holding something for her inspection. Karo-Than looked at it. The man spoke.

"I am Lieutenant Tarin Liant, of the Civil Enforcement Agency, and this is Detective Shard." He gestured to the woman on his left.

"Why are you here?"

"As the result of a surveillance opperation we have reason to believe you are giving shelter to wanted felons."

Surveillance opperation. 

Karo-Than grimaced internally. With those two words he covered the spy his information undoubtedly came from; and suggested she could overlook someone spying on her headquarters. 

"I demand to see your authorization." She countered.

With a dour expression the Lieutenant produced a data card. Both sides were embossed with the holographic seal of the C.E.A. Detective Shard supplied a hand sized flatscreen.

Than knew Liant's authorization was the real thing the second she saw it. It had been issued by the Chief of police himself, which meant Liant had gone over the heads of both her "hired hands" in the department. Worse, it gave him the right to search the mansion; where she had just left Chainy. 

To buy time she looked him in the eye, and said: "I see." 

Her voice could have frozen the air itself.

"While my men keep the ground level secure, a second squad will enter your mansion to ensure our safety. 

"Unless you'd like to make things easy for us?" Karo paused at the top of the stairs, as though she were on the edge of a shear drop. In the places usually occupied by her gaurds were Liant and Shard. 

Behind them, one of the enforcers could hold his peace no longer. "Sir, I think we should go in front. Shouldn't the strike team be the first to enter the residence?"

"I know what I'm doing, son." Liant drawled.

The door slid open without a murmur. 

Karo heard the whisper of fabric, and felt the officers follow her into the living room, like shadows.

"As you can see, Lieutenant, this intrusion on my privacy was quite unnecessary." Karo's voice was loud and hard, her anger not entirely forced. Yet the Lieutenant frowned, sensing something false. 

With a suspicious glance to either side, Liant turned and gestured to his men. "If we don't find anything Lady Than, you'll receive a full writen apology."

The scanning crew arrived. Their equipement could pick up a stray neutron at twenty meters. Karo carefully put herself between them and the bedroom. With any luck her own unusual bio-profile would mask anyone behind her.

Standing there, as if she were in front of a firing squad, Karo realised she was closer to losing her freedom than she had ever been before. It was frightening thought for her. 

She'd always depended on meticulous planning, pre-warning and contingency plans. Now there had been no warning. There was no time to formulate a plan. This was a contingency she had never foreseen.

*

His heart was full of dread, his world turning in ever decreasing circles. Eyes wide, he backed away from the depth screen. As if putting distance between him and a picture could help.

He'd been lucky. Some shocked, numb part of him mind said so. If he hadn't decided to play with the depth screen there would have been no head start. 

Instead he only needed somewhere to run.

Chainy killed the view screen. The picture was distracting. He could easily keep watching until it showed him being arrested. 

He turned his back on the screen and took in the room. Chainy knew he didn't have long, and he needed to know what there was to work with. 

*

Liant was on edge; and when Liant was edge Shard kept the safty on her blaster off. She didn't ask any of the questions she was so good at thinking of. She'd learned that they just got in the way. 

The alien woman moved to one side of the scanning crew. She shifted from one foot to the other, as though there was something special about where she was standing. 

Shard took an inhal from her coat pocket. She put the tiny cylinder's mouthpiece between her lips and bit down on the trigger. Drawing the air though her 

teeth, her mouth filled with the bitter fresh taste of stimulants.

Better. 

Shard thought for a moment, caressing the butt of her Gaurdian Defender. Then she turned to Karo-Than and said: "So what's behind the door?"

She gestured at the door Than wasn't quite blocking. Than was far too willing to make eye contact with her. She broke off glaring at Liant, her new expression assaying the police woman.

Shard needed to see no more. "You and you." she said, "Come with me." Leading the scanning technicians past the proud Twi-Lek, Shard entered Than's sleeping chamber.

She'd seen the homes of enough gangsters to take the sights of the room in her stride. The scanning crew got to work in the corner, and the owner of the room joined them. 

Whatever was most important to Karo-Than, it had to be in this room. She'd walked out on Liant to keep an eye on them. 

Karo felt fear building, supercharging her muscles. They were closing in. The scanner crew were working their way round the walls of the room, towards the hidden closet. It was the only place Chainy could be hiding. Suddenly it stuck her: she hadn't even considered the embarrassment having Chainy found would cause. 

A wanted lover found in her bedroom. What an absurd way to finally be brought down!

The scanning crew reached the point of the wall that concealed the closet. 

Karo began to play with her hands; a nervous habit which usually surfaced just before the shooting. 

Shard watched as long, nimble fingers begin to wrap around each other. Set against Than's confidence it was like seeing a bullet hole in a mirror. 

She could see cracks reaching out from those hands, touching the edges of Than's soul. In response, Shard indulged in a nervous habit of her own. 

She started to rock the gun back and forth in it's holster. Shard was so ready to draw, she could almost pull the gun by accident. 

Cutting though the room's oppressive air like the breaking of someone's skull, there came the sound of a door opening. The sound went between Karo-Than and Juli Shard like a hurled battle axe. 

"Found something?" Shard wouldn't turn her head. The gun was half free of it's prison. 

"It's a hidden compartment." One of the tec's told her.

Than closed her eyes. She tried to collect herself. She could stay cool under fire, but this made her nerves vibrate like violin stings.

"Open it." Shard's eyes were on Karo-Than, her gun almost clear of the holster.

Liant filled the doorway behind Karo-Than. His dark eyes swept over the room, devouring the secrets of everyone therein. 

Two enforcers took places either side of the secret door, like the pillers of an archway. Karo-Than knew; if they opened up with their Hammerhead carbines, that door would be no tougher than a firing range target. 

A technician killed the lock in less than a minute. The door opened, but Karo-Than could here the closing of cell doors.

"It's empty, sir." the technician reported. 

There was a moment of silence, as if no-one quite knew what to do next. Shard was on the edge of pulling her gun. She found she couldn't back away from the act, now that she was so close. Her body was too taut for her to even turn her head; so when she looked to Liant, it was with her eyes.

Liant's face was changeless. From his expression, he might have been told something he already knew. 

Karo-Than witnessed the rest of the search. Relief numbed her; it shielded her from the sight of police enforcers playing with her jewellery, reading her appointment diary, handling her clothing.

They faced each other over the mansion's threshold. Liant had been the last one to leave. Karo-Than felt tired. She didn't glare at him, she wanted him to just go. 

"I'll see to it you get that writen apology." Liant's tone was vailed by darkness.

"I'm sure you're very sorry you didn't find anything." Karo replied. It amazed her this man could think she cared.

The door closed. 

Karo-Than desperately wanted to take a shower. She suddenly needed to be clean. She was a professional though. She thought about business.

Chainy had undoubtedly slipped down the stairs in her wake. The stairs were the only way down from the mansion. At least, they were the only one Chainy could have used. In order to make the trip undetected he must have followed her down the stairs, long before warning of the search. 

He hadn't trusted her. 

Somehow that hurt. She couldn't say why, perhaps because it was late. It had been a busy night and she was too tired to worry over trivialities. Her people would tidy up after the police. 

Sighing, she opened the clasp on her dress. The leather evening gown folded over a handy chair like a pile of autumn leaves. She needed sleep to clear her mind. Three or four hours of it, with the bed massaging her body like an ocean shaping a beach. 

The door to her bedroom opened. The room was occupied. Standing nonchalantly between her and the bed was the illusive fugitive. 

Chainy drank the sight of her naked body like a survivor of a desert filling himself with water, until he was forced to breathe. Chainy wondered; could too much make him ill?

She felt her jaw drop with surprise - a measure of how tired she was. Karo saw him centered in the room like stage magician, appearing to take the applause, only he had taken so much more than just applause. 

A grin spread over Chainy's face. This time it was her body that had surrendered it's secrets, while his remained off limits. After the way she had treated him, it seemed like fair payback.

"How...? Where were you?" 

"Under the bed." Chainy replied. "The electronics from all those gadgets masked me."

He reached out and took her chin, lifting her face to his. Their lips met. Chainy leaned towards her until she was lying back on the bed. 


	4. Flight of the Mendez.

**The Jedi Purge******

**Chapter Four******

**Flight of the Mendez**

The muzzel of the gun seemed big enough swallow him up completely - a long dark tunnel to nowhere. 

Chainy's breath caught behind his ribs. Before he could do anything the gun disappeared, and the man holding it stood up.

"Welcome back." Petri greeted him.

"Wouldn't you rather be waving this round?" Chainy replied, taking Petri's Hawkeye from his jacket pocket. 

"How was she?" the bounty hunter asked.

"Who?" 

"Your old friend."

"Okay. She's still a great business woman."

"I bet." Petri accepted the blaster with gratitude. He spun the familiar wieght in his hand, then holstered it like a fast draw artist.

"Did you get the money?" 

Chainy dropped two large bundles of money on a small table. "One of them belongs to Mos."

"Good. I'll wake him." 

"What?" 

"It's good to have you back. We were going to start tralling the river if you didn't show up by dawn." Petri slipped past Chainy and opened the door. As he crossed the threshold he turned back. "Oh, don't go to bed. We're going to talk to the guy Karo-Than recommended."

"Now?" 

"No time like the present."

"But I haven't slept. You haven't slept."

"We'll let Kelly handle the talking. We'll stay in the background."

"You trust Kelly?" Petri paused, his back turned. Chainy tried a different tack. "Has Kelly slept?"

"He's meditated. Jedi don't need sleep." Petri closed the door with his heal.

*

The exit doors had been left open, leaving a portal into a grim new day. 

Sunlight flooded the chamber like a morning tide filling an ocean bay. The starship brooded under a shaft of light which looked like a pillar carved from the dawn itself. Gathered under it was enough darknes to fill the entire hanger, as though the shadows themselves were seeking asylum from the sun's invasion. 

Kelly, with his superb senses, lead the way; but only after Mos had done what he could with his technology. 

The door yeilded to the jawa's attentions. It's only warning to those it should have gaurded was a whisper of servos as it glided into the wall.

Kelly paused. "Is Mendez the name of the ship or the owner?"

"Ship."

"Willing sell?"

"No. He needs the money."

"We've got sixteen thousand. How much are we going to offer?"

"No more than fifteen thousand. We'll need bribe money."

Behind the Jedi and the bounty hunter Mos stirred. He spoke a single, soft word. "Movement."

"Where?" demanded Petri.

"Inside." whispered the Jawa, indicating the ship.

"We're supposed to be buying his ship, not murdering him in his bed." Kelly reminded them in a normal speaking voice. "I think we can stop sneeking around." 

"The man has money troubles. I doubt fifteen thousand runs to covering all of it. The bounty on our heads might though. 'Sides, not everyone's wild at the idea of losing their ship."

Mos spoke up from besides him. "Trouble. Someone just charged the firing capacitors on a blaster." 

Petri faded to the left, but not before Kelly heard the safety catch on his Hawkeye snap. Chainy swore. He pulled his blaster free too slowly and with too much force.

Kelly felt, rather than heard, Mos manoeuvring his support platform. He knew the Jawa was using him for cover, but didn't mind. 

In his hand was the hard, reassuring surface of his weapon. Kelly drew the lethal wieght free of the strap holding it against his belly. The folds of his robe covered it like the veil of a mourner.

"It's been fired." Mos reported. Outside the ship they heard nothing. 

"Think he offed himself?" wondered Chainy.

The outer airlock door unlatched itself at gunshot volume, it's servo moters twisting it out of sight. Two men; one evil looking, the other merely dangerous, walked out into the landing bay. 

They were professionals. Cheep, but professional. Kelly could tell by the way they realised they had company. 

No words passed between the two. The tall one, Dangerous, backed away to his left. The slim one, Evil, hunched over. His hands were already in his coat, now the fabric moved like something was unfolding it's self inside.

"You want something?" Yelled Dangerous, his voice bouncing off the walls of the hanger bay. 

Kelly considered the question. He also admired their strategy. The pair worked well as a team. Dangerous, who made the easier target, was already worked into the landing geer. Evil, who seemed to be offering himself as a decoy, was ready to disappear back to the airlock behind a cloud of heavy weapons fire.

"I mean you no harm." He told them.

"Good. What do you want?" Evil returned.

"We came to see a ship. We might be buying."

Evil looked back to his friend. His eyes swiftly came back to stare at Kelly. "Captain isn't seeing anyone just now. Asking price is eighteen thousand."

Kelly digested the man's response. Silence spread between the speakers, a tightrope with a fire fight on either side.

"Would you mind if we took a look at what we came to buy? The outside at least."

Evil's eyes narrowed. Kelly could see the man playing out the choices, taking as much time as he could afford to make his decision. 

"Go ahead. You'll want to start at the far end." he said, nodding at the nose of the ship.

Kelly looked to his friends. Petri nodded, uncertainly. Together the four fugitives made way for the hoodlums. Evil threw a look back at Dangerous. He began to walk towards the exit and Kelly knew immediately that when Evil reached the doorway he would turn and wait for Dangerous.

Kelly watched and waited. He saw Evil shoulder his weapon, an assult rifle able to turn someone's head to pulp and bone shrapnel. Then with a chilling, lipless smile Evil took aim; the rifle's barrel a perfect line pointing to Kelly's face.

Dangerous left his makeshift fox-hole under the ship. He walked the concrete floor of the hanger, a featureless grey span between him and safety. 

Hanging in the man's hand, the bulk of a heavy blaster pistol swung back and forth like a corpse on the gallows. 

And then they were gone.

Before Dangerous had to cross Evil's line of fire, he turned and levelled the heavy blaster at Kelly. It was surprising how big the weapon looked, even in the hands of a man this size. Behind him, Evil lowered his blaster rifle and folded his coat over it. Dangerous stepped backwards through the door, and the space he left was filled by silence. 

For a minute nothing moved, as though the world was holding it's breath and wasn't quite ready to let go. 

Slowly Kelly looked down at his feet. 

This was how it went sometimes. You could be ready, but that was no guarantee that violance would erupt. When it didn't you were left with the knowledge that the edge of violance was as draining as bloodshed itself... and your life.

Like the Messiah of mechanics everywhere, the tiny Jawa sat cross legged on his platform. Freed from the fear for his own hide, which was Mos's other great love in life, he closed in on the engines.

There were two aft thrusters, each with a mouth a meter and half wide. They loomed over a sloping square of metal set in the stern of the ship, the cargo loading door. 

Smiling, Mos stared into the belly of the sub-light thruster. By looking through the tail of the drive he could see the compression field generators, lining the gut of the engine. 

There was no gaping mouth for the thrusters, because in space there was no air. There were no compression fans, because the engine ran on plasma, and no metal could survive the merciless touch of star fire. 

A slight sound caught Mos's ear. He lifted his head. He could see nothing moving across the ship, but his eyes locked onto another pair of thrusters. 

Four thrusters. Each a hundred and fifty centimeters wide. That put the ship's sub-light acceleration well over the legal limits. Mos rose higher still, taking in the whole ship from above. They were probably registerd as auxiliaries, or their potential was understated. 

The sub-light drive was based on action and re-action. At close to the speed of light, even a neutron could push the ship through space like it had been kicked. The same thrusters provided the power for hyperspace jumps. Quarks were smashed into energy, to fuel the subspace field that carried the ship through hyperspace.

Mos smiled. Tending the engines on this ship would be a pleasure. There was a dull, metalic sound from the center of the ship's hull. Looking up, Mos saw a tiny circle of sterile white light appear. It began to grow large, and Mos realised he was seeing an airlock iris door open. 

His heart fluttering wildly, Mos gunned the repulsor lift on his support platform. The platform droid soared through the open bay doors, taking him into safety of the open sky.

Below, he could see a man. An old, angary man, clutching a blaster rifle close to his chest. Mos stared down at him, a detached observer. 

They had been ready to fight only moments ago, and the violance had stood them up. Now it seemed the same spectre was going to drop in unannounced. 

The first blast lanced through the air like a spear hurled by an angary god. Kelly's eyes widened. It was all he had time to do before the sniper levelled his blaster rifle - and fired.

But Kelly was a Jedi, and his reflexes were faster than thought itself. His right leg kicked against the floor, his left picked up as though it had been burnt. 

As he dived left the blaster muzzle flashed. Kelly saw the holographic lance light up the air like tracer fire; he knew he wasn't going to escape unscathed. 

The young Jedi twisted away from the searing energy. He felt agony flare in his shoulder and then the concrete surface of the landing bay met his back. He planted his hands on the gritty concrete surface and threw his legs overhead. All it took was a push to flip him base over tip. 

Kelly's planted his feet and righted himself. He could still feel the grime from the floor on his hands, was shocked by the touch of metal against his palm.

Kelly marvelled at how independent his skills were of each other, even as he drew his lightsaber. 

The sniper's blaster rifle flared again, naked energy crashed against concrete; the very place Kelly had lain a heartbeat ago. The weapon's wieght made it clumsy against someone as nimble as a Jedi. 

A plume of sparks lit up the gunman as Petri opened up with his Hawkeye. His shots thundered into the side of the ship, but the hull eclipsed the assassin's position. 

Kelly threw himself into a shoulder roll towards the ship, a blaster bolt darting over his back. 

The bolt drew a perfect line of death from the stock of the rifle, through the air where a slower man would have been, to the ground behind that. It shattered the ground with an explosive shock Chainy could hear through his ribs. The pilot swore through his teeth and turned his back on the fight.

Kelly was closer to the man who was trying to kill him, but the edge of the hull protected him the same way it prevented Petri from getting a clear shot. 

Chainy finished pulling himself up onto the forward thruster. Turning, he jumped from the support pylon onto the dorsal hull itself. 

He was twenty four meters behind the sniper. 

The sniper tried to angle his rifle downward. When it pointed straight down, he realised the overhang above the cargo doors was going to block his aim. He stood up, looking for another target. 

Chainy drew his blaster and pulled back the safety. He stood up and planted his feet firmly on the ship. The blaster pistol wavered as he aimed it at the sniper and thought: 

No. Not in his back. 

Chainy gathered breath to yell.

When the sniper stood, Petri was granted a look at the man's head and shoulders. He caught his breath and aimed.

Chainy yelled. To his horror the order sounded like a near hysterical shriek.

"Drop the..." The sniper turned. The underside of Mos's repulsor platform blocked his view, seeming biger than the whole docking bay. 

Something like a wind, the repuslor field, pressed against his face. As the huge metal dish rushed towards him, he tried to back away. 

"...blaster!" 

His foot found only air to support it. 

Petri's target dropped away. Swiftly, the bounty hunter lowered his gun.

Chainy discovered he was pointing a deadly weapon at his engineer. Very tenderly he allowed the blasters wieght to drag it down, out of harm's way.

Kelly's lightsaber blazed when he sensed motion. There was blur of moving flesh, cut off by a crack that set Kelly's teeth on edge. The lightsaber's sapphire glare highlighted the young man's face, in the shaddows under the ship. 

Carefully, holding his weapon as though it were a spear set against a charging animal, he moved forward until he stood over the body of the man who had tried to kill him.

His would-be killer's face was pale. His skin flacid with age and shiny with a thin coat of sweat. Blood had begun to spread behind the man's head.

There was no sign of life.

Kelly let the lightsaber's blade collapse back along it's length. His eyes ran along the body, finishing their journey on a charred and twisted ruin of a foot. 

Abruptly Kelly noticed the smell of burnt fat and carbon. The wound was recent enough for the blood to remain fluid. Kelly's eyes returned to the sniper's face. The course of things were clear, now. 

Petri leaped from the protection of the starship's hull, his Hawkeye blaster at his side. 

Kelly started, almost guiltily. He was kneeling beside the body of the assassin, one hand outstreached to touch the man's face. When he recovered, he pressed two fingers to the fallen man's face. 

Petri watched as the jedi seemed to retreat within himself, leaving the material world behind. Within a moment the bounty hunter realised he had lost the power to turn away, or even blink. He was entranced, hypnotised. 

There was a quiet sound of metal touching metal. Coming back to himself; Petri traced the sound to his blaster, which he had lowered unconsciously.

Kelly withdrew his hand. The man before him inhaled deeply, and reminded Kelly himself to breath. 

"What's going on?" Chainy called. His voice was strained; unexpectedly it came from dorsal hull of the ship.

"It's the Captain of the ship." Kelly replied. His voice was peaceful, no louder than a normal speaking tone. Surprisingly, it was perfectly adequate.

"He must have thought we were with the "debt collectors". I don't blame him for taking shots at us. They've used a slow beam on his foot." 

Above him, Chainy grimaced.

*

"Captain" was too grand a way to describe Vath Onisca. He was a space tramp, pure and simple. The portmasters he delt with sneered at him. The women who spent time with him loved only his money, which most of them needed desperately.

Vath said that gambling had been kind to him. If so, it had been leading him on, like a cruel woman toying with a lonely man. His ship, the Mendez, was a trophy from a thirty hour card game. So were the debts that had cost him a foot. 

Now he lay in a sleeping niche, lit up like chilled food in a supermarket. 

Vath's sickbed was a mattress, fixed over a row of lockers. There was just enough space for an average man to sit up on the bed, without knocking his skull against a similar set of lockers overhead. Kelly waited by his side, watching over the computer doctor in one of the upper lockers, and an automated surgeon in the one next to that. Between them they tended to Vath's injuries at least as well as a human nurse could have done.

Slumped in the corner like a caged predator, Petri ran his hands over the buff chrome plating of the sniper rifle. As he looked up Chainy stepped into the confined room. 

"Well, I guess you've all seen the outside." Chainy said.

They had.

The ship was cylinder based; it was about six meters high, not counting landing gear. The nose was rounded and blunt, like something powerful and bludgeoning that only remembered how to cut and slide through the air. 

A transparent steel canopy gave the thing a short sighted, mole like, stare. The sides of the canopy gave the pilot a wide enough view to see his forward thrusters. 

Their support pylons were rooted to the fuselage, just behind where the hull began it's noseward curve. The engines themselves were held three meters away from the side of the ship. Only their torpedo like noses set them apart from the jet engines of truly crude, cheep air vehicles.

From nose tip to tail thruster, the ship was twenty eight meters long. 

The tail thrusters, between which Captain Onisca had crouched with his rifle, were part of the ship's duck tail. Three meters before the end of the ship, the lower hull stopped. The cargo loading doors were thick, armoured, hull plating. They formed the stern of the ship, rising up and out a further three meters. Above either top corner of the door was a thruster engine. 

Petri set the blaster rifle against the wall he had been leaning on. His eyes cornered Kelly, almost daring him to turn his back on the patient. 

"What's the verdict?" Kelly spoke up.

"It needs maintenance. I'd say it has done for about five years."

"Is it as bad as it looks?"

"Well, I haven't heard form Mos yet, about the engines. Off hand though, I'd say our best chance is to just sneak past them."

"Weapons?" inquired Petri.

A brief pause hung between the men, spanning the distance like a spider's web. 

"There are no weapons. There's a tracking system. Some gunnery controls and a cannon mounting. I guess he sold the power cell and the gun."

Petri gave Kelly a level stare. "And this is the hulk you think we should get out on?" 

Chainy looked up at him. "I'm sure Mos can come up with something. He can rig up an overdrive on the engines, up their output or something..."

"Wouldn't the Imperial sensors pick up on that?" 

"Not if we arrange some interference."

There was a brief pause, as if everyone was uncomfortable with their chances and didn't know what to say. Then Chainy claped his hands together and left, saying: "I'll give Mos a hand on the technical side. You guys can deal with the data-pushers."

"We'll need to file a flight plan." Kelly observed.

Petri turned his back on the Jedi and walked out. Kelly followed.

"And pay his docking fees." Kelly added, on their way to the flight deck.

Petri said nothing.

"What's eating you?"

"The fact that we're wanted on every planet Nayl to Ebon." 

"That's nothing to worry about once we're away from here." Kelly's tone was dismissive. "We'll get new papers. There are too many people for anyone to keep track of properly. I've done it half a dozen times."

"I caught you."

"Maybe a little cosmetic re-touching."

"You have to give a DNA sample to become a bounty hunter."

"Oh." 

"You didn't know that?" 

The cockpit door opened.

"No. I didn't know that."

"So, where do you want to go?"

The door closed behind them.

*

The tiny freighter cleared the atmosphere and reached for space like a hungry child stretching out for food. Light flared behind it, as the sublights kicked in. The last chains of gravity strained and broke away. 

Starlight beckoned to the crew.

Hanging between them and the terrible freedom of the void was a single frigate. 

The Cyclone was a truly ugly craft, over gunned and muscled for it's size. It cried out officious demands, ordering them to identify and power down.

In the eyes of the Cyclone, the oncoming ship was wrapped in a haze of light. It seemed nebulous, and secretive.

The frieghter was close enough to see the Cyclone's massive weapons pylons, it's leach like docking mouth. The freighter crew watched as it rotated, like the head of an enormous eagle, following it's prey.

A message crackled over the com' board of the fleeing freighter. "Attention vehicle on bearing two hundred ten mark one hundred seventy. Your reactor containment system is emitting subspace and EM static. Power down. Prepare for boarding and manual inspection." 

The message screamed across the vacuum, it's volume goosed, so it could be heard over the throaty roar of the freighter's guts. In response the prey lept forward, like something had kicked it in the tail. It's thrusters glared blue white, like angery suns with X-ray flames. 

As if it were a dozing sentry summoned to wakefulness, the Cyclone twitched. On either side of the bridge weapons pylons stood like the stumps of amputated wings. Silently, but for the vibrations that passed through the hull, the blaster cannons were deployed. They followed the course of the fugitive, ready to unleash their fury in an instant.

"Unidentified freighter, power down immediately." Cyclone decreed.

The little ship took no notice, continuing it's reckless dash for space. Blistering emerald light exploded from the cannon muzzles, a union between wrath, fire and lightning. It leaped the gap between the two ships like a thunderbolt and died, leaving only an afterglow for those who had seen it.

"Unidentified freighter, that was a warning shot. You will power down or we will open fire."

Denied it's liberty, the freighter cut it's engines abruptly. The ship continued to drift, wobbling almost petulantly as the Cyclone's tracter beams locked with it.

Grimly, the customs frigate draged the runaway towards it's docking mouth. Within minutes the two ships were locked together. 

That was when the Mendez made it's break for freedom. 

Coming up from the same spaceport, it parted company from it's assigned course and increased power. Clearly the new arrival planned on forgoing the customs inspection. 

The Cyclone barked orders at the Mendez. They were ignored. 

The Mendez's four thrusters were already open full throttle, leaving a trail of light like a silver thread. 

Chainy's body was full of tension. He wanted to worry about what the customs ship was doing, but couldn't afford the time. He forced himself to concentrate on dealing with the demands of the flight deck. 

Mos had done something clever with the reactor. It was putting out far more than it should, without much danger of exploding. 

The shields were down. They had to be. Chainy was giving the engines all they had. Everything seemed heavy, clumsy; with the drives red lined the acceleration compensators were acting heavy handed. 

The keyboard typing behind him came to an abrupt end, and he knew that Kelly had a course. 

"Got it." the Jedi announced. "Throw the switch any time you want." Chainy's fingers trembled with the urge to escape, but he held back. 

"Check that Mos is ready." He licked his lips. "I don't want to go to hyperspace and fry all our power ducting."

The Cyclone broke free of the freighter and spun as it drifted clear. Thrusters glared horribly, as the ship got under way. 

The fleeing Mendez was almost out of range when the blaster bolts started flying like spears. The first salvo cut across the target's wake. 

The frigate gunner over compensated, as the Mendez threatened to pull clear of their weapons altogether. A bolt of light, so harsh Chainy had to shield his eyes, lit up meters away from the flight deck viewport. 

They've almost go our number, thought Chainy. I can't wait any longer. He threw the switch, and the stars danced madly before him.

*

"Well, I guess we made it. We outsmarted them." Chainy remarked.

Almost to see if the pilot had tempted fate, Petri checked the view from the flight deck. All clear.

"Can't a customs frigate trace a ship? Even after it's gone to hyperspace?" Kelly handed the ex-bounty hunter a data-pad.

Chainy shook his head. "I paid Vincenzo to lean on the bit of his ship that was causing interference. Just when they'd be trying to get a fix on us."

"They'll throw the book at him." prophesied Petri. 

"He can pay them out of the thousand credits we gave him."

"I've been thinking..."

"Dangerous past time." warned the ex-smuggler. 

As a comeback it was tired at best, but it distracted Petri from deciding they could have safely split up on the surface. 

"How long before we're re-charged?"

Chainy turned back to the Jedi. "Only another ten minutes. Then I'll have Mos put the reactor back to normal. Be a shame to blow ourselves up after outrunning the Civil Authority."

"If it was so dangerous for us to go near your smuggler pals, how come you could bribe one to play decoy?" 

Damn. He's been thinking again, thought Chainy. 

"I didn't exactly go near him..." The pilot pointed out. "I called him from the ship's terminal. Knew the Civil Enforcers wouldn't conect us with this tub 'til we'd made our break." 

"For that matter, how come they didn't see us when we came to buy this barge?" 

"The two "debt collectors" we saw probably paid someone to be repairing the security system when they came calling."

"We didn't know that."

"Mos said the security system was down." Put in Kelly. "I thought it was convenient. If you're not reading that..." He reached across for the data pad.

"What is it?" wondered Petri, as he surrendered the display screen.

Chainy looked up from the captain's chair. "Did I mention what Karo-Than said, just before I left?" His face was nervous.

Something about his casual tone tripped Petri's early warning system. "No. What?" 

"If any one of us..., er, defaults on the loan, then the others become responsible for his debt."

"There's a lot of traffic near Gothine. Any persuers could lose a ship like this, in amongst that turbulence." Kelly said thoughtfully.

"Do we split up there?" Chainy had spoken, but all three of them seemed to wait on Petri's reply. 

"And have one of you three default?" He said at last. "Leave me with a debt I can't pay? You'd like that, wouldn't you?" 


	5. Corona.

**The Jedi Purge******

**Chapter 5******

**Corona**

The Mendez was an impressive sight, seen for the first time. Twenty eight meters of metal and power, tall as a three story building, all weighing two hundred and twenty nine tons with the power to kick it's own weight to the stars. 

It was less impressive seen from the inside. Especially after three consecutive days. 

Starlight from the magnificent vista of hyperspace painted the flight-deck in a thousand tones of gray and silver and blue. It gave the cramped compartment the illusion of being a wide open space. Petri, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, looked like a titan. 

He had taken to coming here at night, when he couldn't sleep, or when he needed to get away from his friends. Three days they had been sealed up in this metal can, waiting to get to a major trade route. Waiting to be safe. 

Petri took his helmet in one hand. He always wore his armour for a least three hours every day. Usually longer. He worked out slavishly the first day of the journey. Push ups, target practice, unarmed combat, all wearing his armour. The second day he had done his usual exercises, but lounged about afterwards wearing nothing but his body suit. 

Today he had put on his armour, walked into the recreation room and found Kelly, Chainy and Vath, arguing over star charts. He'd gone straight there and had no intention of leaving for at least two hours. Until Chainy spoke up, that is. 

"We need your vote to decide where we're going." he said. "It's not much of a choice, but you know Kelly and the rest of those drongos. Show them a double headed coin and they'd still call tails." 

"Forget it. I'll vote with the majority." If Chainy's nose was out of joint, too bad. Petri was staying well out of it. 

"Ah, don't say that." Chainy did something with the navi-station. Harsh primary colours danced in the air.

The galaxy was easily recognizable; the stars flickered in their natural colours. A single wire frame box surrounded two hundred stars, amongst which there were just fifty that someone might call a sun. 

The box, representing the Gothstein sector, swelled to take up the space of the galaxy map. The process was repeated until the a mere half dozen suns were displayed in a cube of air the width of a man's chest. It seemed to be ribbed with green pipes, running between inhabited worlds like blood vessels. 

In one vain crawled a tiny, red, corpuscle-like dot. That was them. Two yellow dots followed, a little way behind them. These were customs cruisers. They had been followed from Ordian by the local stellar guard. 

The guard's duties were normally to stop and search approaching ships, but these had been tenacious. They would be working with the Imperial navy. That meant there would be a couple of navy ships filling in for them, back home. Anyone trying to run the frontier would be lucky not be blasted to ash. 

"See? This is where we are, just here." Chainy pointed to a stretch of green, about five centimetres long. It branched onto a larger hyperspace route about a centimeter from where they were. 

A centimetre. Petri blinked behind his visor. They had roughly half a light year to go, then. There were three light years between most stars, but only one in five had planets. Those stars were marked with green arrows to warn of the danger they posed to a ship in hyperspace. Inhabited or not, a million, million, million tons of rock can cause a big enough dent in the universe to knock any ship out of hyperspace. 

There had been fifteen light years ahead of them at the beginning of their journey; Petri knew, he'd checked. In this tired, old ship they could travel about a light year a day. 

In twelve hours they would reach the junction. A tiny spot was there, waiting for them. It was bright purple, which meant it could only be an Imperial Navy ship. 

"A mass projector ship?" he asked, knowing the answer already.

"Yeah. Sneaky things those. Nasty. Nothing else like them for snatching a ship out of hyper-space. Nasty." Chainy spoke with all the horror and disgust of a smuggler faced with an unbeatable blockade. 

Listening to him filled Petri with concern. If Chainy saw the blockade ship as such a hazard, they could be in trouble.

"So what are our choices?" he prompted.

"Not many. We've got to leave the shipping lanes. Cut across this corner, here, like I told them." 

Ah. Here we went. Into I'm not going to be out-voted land. 

"What do the others want to do?"

"Well, Mos agrees with me, of course. But Kelly had some wild idea about switching off the marker beacon and turning the ship around."

"Turning off the marker beacon sounds like a good idea." 

"It does, until you realise that it can't be done while we're in hyper-space."

Uh-oh. 

"That means we'd have to enter real-space." Nobody needed to hear what that meant. Petri knew that while in real-space the pursuing ships would gain on them. "How long would it take?" he asked. 

"Vath says two hours. Mos told him thirty minutes, but there aren't any suits in his size and whoever does the job'll have to go outside."

"I meant for them to catch up."

"Oh. That. Hour and a half, Vath reckons. I think a bit longer, myself. Mind you, he's done the work." 

Vath would be right then. No matter what Chainy's first impression was. He use to be a good smuggler, Petri thought. If he made a habit of trusting to instinct as much as he seemed to, it was no surprise he'd been forced to retire. It might also explain why he was so nervous all the time. 

"Could we interrupt the work and re-enter hyper-space?"

"No. The beacon's wired into the communications antenna and the hyper-drive motivator, plus a whole slew of safety systems. They have to be disengaged, as well." 

"So how come the others voted to do it?" 

"Who said they did?" Chainy looked genuinely hurt. Petri could see the man's thoughts turning behind his eyes, guessing at Petri's assumptions. The bounty hunter sighed and pulled off his helmet. 

"Why bring it up if they didn't?" 

"The beacon allows them to see us. It'll still allow them to see us, whether we're following the hyper-space lanes or jay-walking." 

"And they'll know they're following a safe path, because we'll have tried it for them." Completed Petri. 

"Worse, we'd have to slow down. Only way to make sure the way ahead's clear. They'd know it was."

The bounty hunter's face twisted in disgust. "Sounds like they get us either way."

"We don't have any weapons on board. We could hardly make a fight of it."

Petri's eyes flash furiously at Chainy. They were filled with a dreadful, awful hate and Chainy knew that hate could be fuelled by only one thing. Fear.

"Could we?" pressed Chainy.

"I'm a bounty hunter. I won't be at the mercy of convicts. Ever." 

"The only other alternative is to deal with them in real-space."

"Fine. We do that."

"There aren't any weapons."

"We'll wait until they board to arrest us." Petri felt wild now. He thought he was hiding it, but he came across like he had taken the bad news as a personal insult. 

"That's no good. Even if we win, their ship'll just blow a hole in our hull."

"Well, we'd better do something; because I'm not going quietly."

*

The Mendez appeared in the night as though it had merely slipped out of a shadow. It's bow was bathed in the blue-white leer of a young and searing sun. The flight deck window was dark to prevent the instant blinding of the pilots. 

The troublesome hyper-space beacon had fallen silent, starved of power from the star-drive. That meant the pursuing ships could no longer see their quarry, just a flickering marker on their navigation displays to mark the point where Vath and cut the hyperspace engines. 

Chainy was drifting weightless outside the ship within moments. He was tethered by the single silver thread of his safety line, his only anchor to something solid. 

Chainy looked into the void that surrounded him, lonely and distant. For three days he had lived on the echoing metal deck of the Mendez. Now the hollow shell beneath him seemed the solid and reassuring, compared to the distant and indifferent stars.

*

"I've got another one." Kelly leant over the sensor panel, it's garish neon colours branding him with their advertising shades. 

"No good." Vath told him. "A comet is just so much powdered ice. We need something solid. Substantial. Planet, asteroid, something like that. Anything dense with a lot of metal atoms will do."

"This star's too young for what we need." 

"Keep looking." 

The door to the flight deck wheezed open, allowing Petri to scowl at them. The bounty hunter had his mask on, but Kelly could scent his fear, even through carbon alloy harder than diamond. 

"Seven minutes gone. Why aren't we moving?" 

"We haven't found somewhere to move to..." Began Vath.

"I don't care. We should be moving! I don't want to be just sitting here when they show up." 

Silence. Kelly winced as Petri clamped down hard on his feelings and his voice. They could hardly start the engines with Chainy on the outside of the ship. 

"Why aren't you manning the gunner's chair?" Kelly tried to make it sound casual. If Petri decided his erstwhile prisoner was playing leader again, he might pick a fight. Ordinarily, Kelly would have encouraged Petri to relax, and if that meant swapping punches so be it. But now he had work to do. Petri would have to keep. 

"Do you have a position on those customs ships?" Petri demanded. He ignored Kelly's question as though it were background noise.

We're back to that, are we? Kelly thought to himself. He made himself concentrate on the display until he thought his eyes would burn a hole in it. 

Kelly leant back from the sensor console. "I've found a protoplanet five hours by C away."

"Too far." 

"We could use the hyper-drive?"

Petri slammed his hands against the bulkhead. The blow crashed in the confined space, an ugly sound. "I'm tired of wasting time!" He shouted and with that, he stormed out.

Vath and Kelly looked at each other. Vath seemed unnerved. He had known Petri for only a few days, so Vath couldn't know whether this was normal behaviour. 

"He's not going to do anything stupid, is he?" Vath asked.

"I haven't known him that long myself." Excused Kelly. "But he's right, you know. It wasn't like this when we worked together. We just decided what we wanted and did it."

"So what's different?"

"I don't know. Before, I saw every thing so clearly. It was like knowing what everyone else was going to say before they did."

"They said you were a jedi. Is that one of your tricks?" 

Kelly didn't answer. He didn't know. The only teacher Kelly had ever known had been executed. It had been Petri who turned him over for execution. That thought sent a wave of resentment through his body like a drug. 

He had been holding back for days and now that vital emotional energy set him free from all concerns. When he forced himself to return to the sensor sweep, his anger fuelled him, drove him; until his stare threatened to burn through the display.

A memory came to him. 

His teacher, Avilard, close to the beginning of their association. Kelly had come to him, sick with anger at the un-fairness of the world. Dan had told him: "Don't look for fairness in the world. Look for it in yourself and apply it to those around you." 

As he worked on the sensors, looking for a place to hide, more and more gradually came back to him. 

The first time Dan Avilard had mentioned the force they had been sitting under a dead tree. It had been alive the first time Kelly had climbed it, as a child, but pollution from the nearby factory had withered it. Over the preceding months the old man had weaned Kelly of his simmering hate and resentment. 

"The universe is a living thing, Kelly." The old man told his student. "The force is it's spirit, it's life energy. It grows when it is used in the name of good, to protect life. We have it in ourselves to reach out and touch this force. To shape it how we chose, to do what we will."

Kelly smiled. The time he had spent with the old man had been the turning point in his life and he would always be grateful for it. 

*

Chainy waited for the airlock door to open. He hated that. He was the impatient type, and he always worried that something would short out and leave him stuck in there. 

The door opened with an alarming stutter. Mos was sitting cross legged on the other side, waiting to talk to him. He stared at his former captain with tiny glowing eyes, a look of quiet contemplation on his withered, ancient face. 

"We must talk." the engineer said. 

"Oh? We've already tried a lot of that and it didn't get us anywhere." Chainy observed, bitterly. 

"We must talk about the future."

"Got a little crystal ball, have you? Oh well, at least someone's sure we've got a future." 

Petri's boots rang against the metal deck gratings. He passed between the two of them without appearing to notice either, but behind his carbonite death-mask it was hard to tell. 

"I'm getting morbid." Chainy told the engineer. 

"That is what pessimism does for you." Mos replied.

"And you have something optimistic to tell me." Chainy stepped out of the airlock and began to remove the space-suit. 

"Things are no longer as they were on Ordia."

"Going to pieces, you mean? I noticed that." Going to pieces. That was what it felt like; as if they were separate, broken pieces from a single thing. "I just can't figure it out. Back then everything was going perfectly. Now it's like we can't agree which room to argue in."

"It was the jedi. We were spokes in his wheel."

"Oh. Pulling our strings, you mean? Yeah, reckon that fits. I never could see me and Petri working together and me going to Karo-Than, that was taking a real chance."

"You no longer work together, yet we are all taking a greater chance than before." 

"There's nothing I can do about it. If Kelly was forcing us to work together, how come he's stopped? He's in as much danger as the rest of us. And why didn't he make Petri let him go? Let them both go, before the old man was executed."

Mos twisted the hem of his robe in his hands. He didn't know. 

"I'll go and talk to him." Chainy told his engineer. "Take care of my space suit." 

The bridge door slid open faster and smoother than the airlock door. It left Chainy standing there, speechless. When he collected his thoughts he voiced, gently: "I was wondering if I might have a word, Kelly; in private, like."

Kelly glanced at the captain of the Mendez. Then he rose and followed Chainy into the corridor. 

Outside, Chainy turned and stared piercingly at Kelly. "Did you use your powers to manipulate us on Ordia?" the ex-smuggler demanded with all his will. As he had hoped, the change of speed threw Kelly off balance. 

"Not directly."

"That means yes."

Kelly hung on the edge of saying the wrong thing and he knew it. His dismay showed on his face. 

"Don't get the wrong idea." Chainy told him. "I mean, you got us out of there, so your alright in my book." His voice cringed in apprehension. It was a stinging reminder. Kelly had seen people look at his teacher with terror, fear, mistrust; none of which his master had earned. For twenty millennia the Jedi had been the backbone of all that was good, now that was forgotten for the atrocities committed by a handful of renegades. 

"I meant no harm." Kelly confessed, turning away. When he spoke it was hesitatingly, as though he doubted his own word. "I didn't manipulate you; not in the way you mean. It was so easy to - imagine a safe path through the argument."

"Well, what difference could that have made? You must have done something, other than that, I mean."

"Normally people are saying the wrong thing, or ignoring something important. They never get on as well as they might. I helped us to understand each other."

Chainy thought about it, planting his fists against a bulkhead and trying to shut the world out until he had figured everything out. Even Kelly's composure had been broken. Instead of serene he seemed helpless; despairing. 

Eventually Chainy spoke. "You know, thinking back it does seem odd, how I could suddenly understand Mos's body language. I can't do that normally." he took a deep breath. "Look, friend, we need a way out of this and we need it fast. If you've got something up your sleeve you've got to pull it out, no two ways about it."

"I know. Look, you're a smuggler. Aren't there any dodges we could use?"

"We have to find something to hide behind and disable the hyper-space beacon. Preferably group of somethings, because it gives the people looking for us more choice."

Shrieking alarms cut the air between them. Their flesh crawled as if their nerves were being grated. It could only mean the worst. Together they hurled through the cockpit door, expecting to see disaster bearing down. 

Vath heard them coming. "Customs ships. Bearing down at us, nine point four oh." he yelled.

"Range?" Kelly yelled as he flew at his control chair.

"Point oh-seven eight seconds by C."

Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand miles. Like most star-ships, the customs cruisers were absurdly dependent on their hyper-space drive. If the crew of the Mendez were lucky they might have time to say a prayer...

"One minute seventeen seconds. Less if they decide to pull a micro-jump."

Micro-jumps. Now they were risky. Close things are always hard to navigate, and as far as a hyper-space navigation's concerned there isn't much difference between one mile and a million. Often times it was faster just to wait for the ship to get there on it's own, real-space style...

Chainy read the screen without sitting. "Oh no. No, no, no." his words running together from his panic. 

"They weren't going fast enough. They can't be here." Vath yelled over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and pleading. He hadn't asked for this.

Chainy pulled the last few hours from the computer log. His lips thinned. "I knew I should have checked things out myself. You thought they were following us at their best speed. They weren't. They were just tracking." 

"Sixty seconds. They won't pull a micro-jump. Unless their navigator's something else, it'd take half an hour to do the maths." 

"They're closing. We've no where to go."

Vath had reached the limits of his experience. He looked back at Chainy with something approaching desperation on his face. "Is there anything we can do? I'm open to suggestions."

The ex-smuggler pulled himself into the co-pilot seat. The controls were like strangers to him; for a moment he remembered his own star-ship, the "Stag party". That part of himself was dead now, captured and destroyed. 

Sacrificed to throw the police off the trail.

Chainy ran his gaze across the controls, feeling unfaithful as he did. It was like betraying a lover; or the memory of one. 

They were in a bad situation and he knew it. No reason not to let the others know it as well. He slapped the intercom button. 

"There are two cruisers coming in, we're going to try and keep some distance between them and us. Hold tight, everybody." 

Reaching out like he was about to touch a woman, Chainy took the controls in hand. The Mendez was a working ship and it's controls were all sturdy metal limbs, like you might find in something that belonged in an iron foundry. Gently, he eased two of them forward. Despite their heavy appearance they moved smoothly.

Chainy didn't know what the Mendez could do but he guessed it would be about half the acceleration of the customs ships, which gave them thirty seconds in which to surrender, fight or do something that would save their hides.

*

Petri's grip on the gunner's joystick was tight enough to make the plastic creak. Vath had grafted the new system into the bare ribs of the craft with little or no skill and less respect for the technology that preserved his life. There was no strong protecting metal here, just cheap plastic and bad wiring. 

The bounty hunter was in the gunner's chair, facing the transparent alloy that stood between him and the hard vacuum of space. It was called the gunner's punch-bowl, a dome through which you could see enemy ships even with your sensors gone and your tracking computer on fire. It's view was incredible, one of the most written about things in space. 

But Petri wasn't admiring the stars. His body canned and hidden in armour plating, lit up by the sharp light of the nearby star; he stared into that furnace, taking it for granted that the filters in the gunner's canopy and his helmet's visor would take care of all the harmful rays. 

His memory had turned to his father and the days when the old man had slouched in his chair after a hard day's casual labour. In the evenings, Petri's mother would go out to work in the hospital, and his father would choke back a couple of beers with his son at his feet. And sometimes he would tell stories. They were hard stories, meant to make the boy hard, so he could take care of himself in a bad world. At least, that was what his father said when mother came home and started shouting. 

As Petri grew up the stories seemed all the harder because, occasionally, he learned that they were true. He remembered the stories about prison, especially. 

He hadn't believed they were true. When he was little. 

But the last time he had seen his father had been between two huge policemen and the look on his suddenly shrunken, deflated parent was enough to convince him. 

Life in any ghetto is hard. Without both parents it is often impossible. Petri and his mother had got by, until someone found out that drugs were going missing from the hospital. That someone had been Rennie, who swiftly became mother's new boyfriend. He had moved in and a brittle tension had moved him with him. 

It hadn't lasted long. 

Rennie had been found in a stairwell with a hole in one lung and story about Petri's mother on his lips. The black market slug-thrower was found in their apartment. That was all it took. 

When Chainy's voice crackled over the speakers the message it brought sent a sick tidal wave of fear through him. Petri controlled the fear, as he had all his life. He reached for the super-clarity of a professional, someone who spent their life getting ready for the next battle, but all that came to him was the battle rage he had felt facing the government enforcers on Ordia.

Jerking the guns round to bear on the incoming ships, the bounty hunter felt the inside of his mask pressing against his face. It shocked him. It was the first time the mask had felt like anything other than a part of him. That was the way he had always thought of it; another face, belonging to someone strong, someone invincible. He didn't feel that way now. Cold sweat clung to his skin like ice. 

The cruisers were closing on the runaway starship, their sub-light engines chewing up the space between them. The Mendez screamed through the void at half their speed like a woman in high heeled shoes running from a gang of muggers. 

The flight deck was choked by a panicked babble of voices. Kelly ran some figures through his computer and came up with an answer that wasn't high enough. The cruisers were accelerating at terrifying rate, in fifty seconds they would be travelling at half the speed of light. Their own starship wouldn't reach such a velocity for another two minutes. 

Kelly quickly reviewed what he knew about most starships. Anything capable of hyperspace was powered by a nuclear reactor, which was shielded both by containment fields and high density alloys. Landing on a planet required repulsor lift, because that was the smoothest way to negotiate a powerful gravity well. At the moment the customs ships were running on their sub-light drives, which were capable of about a hundredth of the hyperspace coil's output. 

The hyperspace coils got their power from the sub-light drives in the form of a superheated plasma. As soon the hyperspace motivator sent a stream of electrons coursing through the super-conducting metals, a energy field sprung up around the sub-light engines. 

As the highly charged ions from the sub-light engine cut across it two things happened. The ions slowed and the hyperspace coils lifted the ship into another dimension called hyperspace, where light travels at C squared. No ship could reach C squared, but even a tenth of that speed could cover a light year in half a day. 

Kelly's display screen flickered to the tune of incoming data. He interpreted the diagrams and their multi-coloured labels at a glance and summed up what they told him in one short phrase. "Hull sensors are picking up high density scans." He told the others.

Up front, Chainy rasped a dry tongue across his lips and tried to speak. His nerves were showing. Worse than they had been in ages, it was all too obvious why he had been forced out of the smuggling game. "They must be trying to get a weapons lock. How long before they're in range?"

"They're already in range." Kelly replied.

"They can't be! They'd be firing at us if they were in range!" If anything, Vath's nerves were worse than Chainy's. 

"Not if their weapons weren't fully charged. They just dropped out of hyperspace, their power might be running a little low." The ex-smuggler replied.

Vath was not the only one who seemed amazed. "What, they do that? Drop out of hyperspace without protection or anything?" 

"That's what they're carrying missiles for."

"Missiles!?" Vath was incoherent now. "Oh, I should've stayed on Ordia. At least I could have been buried if anything happened to me there!"

"If they've got missiles, why aren't they using them?"

"They still need a lock-on. Missiles are slow and clumsy, if you don't show them what they suppose to be chasing real good, they're liable to go looking for something better."

"If they're so slow, can't we out run them?"

"They aren't that slow." Chainy said, darkly.

Kelly had little hope of achieving anything at the sensor station, but the same terminal served the navigation computer. There was just a chance that he could navigate a safe course out of the system, one that would buy them enough time to think of a way out of this.

He began number crunching, hitting keys like unfaithful lovers. His fingers sure and decisive, the computer refused to play the game. Vath had stuck by the tried and true routes since he first took to the stars, he had seen no reason to splash out on a new data base containing alternative routes. Without the data on this system the navigation computer only had the RAM data from Kelly's sensor sweep to go on. 

It wasn't enough.

The computer was wasting time and Kelly knew it. It was spending time justifying tenuous deductions where a human would have just made best guesses. He could almost see the numbers before the computer made them appear. And suddenly, quite suddenly, without realising how he was doing it, he knew what the answer would be when it was finished.

He began hitting overrides without questioning it, let the impulse take him like a surfer riding his chosen wave. He reached the conclusion suddenly, starting back from the key board as he realised there was nothing left to type. 

Turning to their pilot, he said: "Course computed. Hit it."

Chainy looked round at him, amazed, and the hull rocked like ocean trawler in high seas. The first blaster bolt had reached across ninety thousand miles and touched them like a giant hand slapping a child's face. His options expired, the ex-smuggler turned back to the controls. With one hand he reached out to the lever that could send them through light-years of empty space or into the heart of a sun. 

The stars blurred together and ran like melting butter. Hyperspace twisted before them, a receding spiral of light and dark, lasting forever and stretching out as far as they could see. There was the sudden brief shock of entering another universe, just as there always was. 

Then, as quickly as it came, the hyperspace tunnel vanished. 

Chainy watched the flight deck canopy go dark, then black, in less time than it took for his heart to lurch into his mouth. A sun raced towards them, gigantic and swollen, and for the first time ever Chainy felt like he was falling instead of slowing down. Behind him Kelly dived for the shield controls. 

Vath's voice rose in a drawn out cry of terror. Kelly sensed the intensity of his fear the same way another man might feel a rise in room temperature. Speaking of which, the confines of the cockpit had suddenly become hotter than a dry heat sauna. Kelly's lightning navigation had brought them close to the blue dwarf sun. Closer than anyone had ever been to it, in fact. 

From the flight deck it filled half their field of vision, blinding them even through the polarized canopy. Giant ribbons of star-fire arched through the sun's magnetic field towards them. With mounting horror Chainy saw the ribbons soared higher than the ship had climbed. Beautiful and devastating, the slightest touch from one arching coil of plasma would cremate them in a flash. 

Chainy knew that even if he pulled the Mendez away from it's suicidal dive and shook off the sun's magnetic field, they would still face the challenge of getting past the two customs ships that had been chasing them; which would very likely end with them stranded on a prison planet for twenty years. 

Feeling the controls shiver against his demands, he tried to concentrate on what it would be like spending the next two decades tied to the ground. The grubby soil of some hostile alien planet shrugging off his efforts to eke a living out of it. It felt good. 

It took his mind off the solar flares. 

A single bridge of golden fire rolled towards them. In a second it would reach them and they would be erased, atomized in the blink of an eye. 

Chainy increased the angle of their climb. Multiple Gee-forces settled on the crew like a lead blanket. The internal gravity field began to lose it's grip. Behind him, Chainy heard Vath crash to the floor. 

Vath clutched his knee with hands the weight of sledgehammers. He could feel it swelling already, and was suddenly grateful he wouldn't have to live with the injury until it healed. 

"We're not going to make it!" Kelly yelled. 

Chainy heard him and knew he was right. The solar flare was closing on them like a tidal wave heading for a beach. It was growing larger by the heartbeat and Chainy's heart was beating so fast it was ready to explode. 

He had thought solar flares were beautiful, once. 

Hyperspace, exploding stars and ion storms, it had all been part of the wild beauty of space back at the academy. Who cared if looking at it gave you radiation poisoning? You were free in the only way that counted. 

The plasma stream filled the flight deck windscreen, a river of death a thousand miles wide. Chainy tried to wet his lips with a tongue as dry as sand paper and remembered spending the night in a planetarium, a girl with suntanned legs watching the stars turn beside him. 

Looking back, he had preferred it when the solar flares were nothing more than an explosive display of what happened when a gas got too hot to hang on to it's electrons. 

"You're going to hit it!" Kelly yelled again. "We can't climb fast enough." 

"There's no choice." Chainy rasped, his throat cracked. "We have to get over it."

"We can't! There's only one chance and that's to go under it. You have to dive, Chainy!" Chainy twisted to look back at Kelly, his eyes wide with disbelief. The Jedi's face was strained with tension, but there was no denying the conviction in his eyes. 

Chainy twisted the control yoke hard right before he had finished turning back from Kelly. The sun's gravity began working for them, instead of threatening to tear the ship apart. Rolling the Mendez over meant that the flight deck was angled away from the wall of plasma. Even the true surface of the sun a million miles below was dim by comparison. 

The solar flare rolled towards them as though they were a speck of dust in a giant eye, waiting to be swept away. Then, in an instant, it was upon them. 

*

The customs ship "Leopard" reverted to normal space in a micro-second. It's hull surfaces were a glaring, incandescent gold in the relentless hurricane of light. 

Inside, Captain Alverez gave thanks that the livery of the Cassandra Customs Patrol was white and gold. Until it burned off, the paint would reflect most of the energy that was pouring into the ship. Already, the air on the bridge was nearly too hot to breath. 

Lieutenant Marks was holding his arm gingerly with a pained expression on his face. He had been leaning against the now black view-shield when the ship came out of hyperspace; the transparent alloy had heated up so quickly he hadn't had time to pull away. Damn him, Alverez scowled, just when he was needed. 

"Helm, locator lock on the target ship." the Captain barked. "Someone man Marks' station, find out whether the other ships made it out safely." 

There had been three customs ships in the pursuit party, flying in a flat triangle formation and Alverez knew the lead ship would have had less warning than them. He glanced across at Marks who, baring his teeth in pain, returned to the sensor/communications board. 

Lieutenant Bix turned in his chair so he could look at the captain. "The target ship re-entered real-space at five mark seven range,... range ten CS, sir. That puts them inside the sun's corona."

Captain Alverez's face grew taut. He had no sympathy for smugglers, but no one who made their living in space could welcome the news that someone had fallen prey to it's hazards. "All stations;" he said gruffly, "status report."

It took half a minute to get all the reports in. By that time Lieutenant Marks had regained contact with one of the other ships and a start had been made on hauling the lead ship clear of the sun's lethal radiation. It would be a long slow job using the tractor beams, but the Leopard had enough shield power left to protect it's own crew at least. 

*

The Mendez hurtled around the sun in an incredibly tight orbit. Its sensors and its communications systems had blown out almost before Chainy had finished pulling them out of their crash dive. It's shields had been pushed to maximum the moment Kelly realised where they were. Even now they were being stripped away by the searing light and even more deadly radiation that threatened to swamp the ship.

Petri blundered his way out of the access tunnel that led to the ship's ventricle blaster station. The lighting strips that normally guided the gunners to their cramped compartment had been blown out by the first scorching wave of energy that hit the ship. He lay where he was for a moment, on the corridor floor in his blast proof armour, his legs in the access-way dangling over the gunner's cradle. He was exhausted. 

On the flight deck the alarms had stopped. When the plasma streamer had passed overhead Chainy had gasped like a man in the last moments of sexual intercourse. Three seconds after he hit the alarm reset button the communications panel on his right exploded. Vath was weeping and cursing at the same time as he broke out the fire extinguisher and turned it on the smoking console. 

Kelly was shunting all the power he could get to the shields, buying them another few minutes before the Mendez took the full force of the sun's rage. When the shields failed the ship would swell up and burst like a bubble of spit in a frying pan. 

Then the lights went out, plunging the whole ship and the crew who were struggling desperately to save it, into darkness.

*

Captain Alverez looked down at the instrument readings, forcing the young officer manning the station to hunch down in his seat. 

"Hm. That shouldn't have happened." Alverez said, as the readings replayed the last moments before the accident.

"Uh, what shouldn't have?" The young officer hated having someone read over his shoulders. "Sir." he added. 

"Right there. Where we used our forward tracking array to follow them. Why didn't it pick up the danger before they did? Our system's better."

"Well sir, I'd have to guess, but a starship's hyperspace wake creates allot of distortion. We were so close behind them, we could have missed something further away."

"Like a medium sized star, for example."

"Um, it's not really medium sized, sir. It's a dwarf, at best."

"When I want a lesson in astronomy I'll call you, Ensign Cordo. But since I want a competent hyperspace pilot just now I'll talk to your replacement."

Shock, dismay and embarrassment crossed Cordo's face in quick succession. Before he could give voice to any of them, Alverez had walked away. 

"What's the delay?" Alverez demanded of another officer. "We should be getting the Orion's crew off by now." 

"It's the Orion's captain, sir. He says his crew's staying with the ship, sir." 

"The hell they are. Let me speak to him." Alverez reached past Marks to the communications board. "Bridewell? This is Alverez. What's this nonsense about your crew not abandoning ship?"

"I'll thank you not to call my command decisions 'nonsense', Captain Alverez. Your direction to abandon ship was given without full possession of the facts, and without respect for the chain of command."

Alverez ground his teeth before speaking. "Captain Bridewell, I must remind you of field directive 143, governing the passing of command in emergency conditions. When the lead ship of a pursuit formation is incapacitated command passes to the most experienced ranking officer in the area." 

"That hardly justifies discarding a serviceable ship out of panic."

"I wouldn't call your ship serviceable, Bridewell. In fact I'd say it was only barely viable and, as I'm the officer in charge here, I'd say what I would and wouldn't call your ship goes straight to the heart of the matter, wouldn't you?"

"We only require fourteen hours work to achieve acceptable operational levels."

"You don't have fourteen hours, I'm only willing to give you fourteen minutes. We don't have enough shield power to maintain our position here for that long."

"If we maintain our current course and heading for seventy minutes, the radiation will be sufficiently reduced for us to complete our basic repairs before the shield power is exhausted." 

"Yes, if we run the shields at low power and except higher levels of neutron bombardment. I'm not prepared to expose my crew to that kind of hazard."

"Not prepared! What about the radiation my crew will soak up while they're transferring to another ship?" 

"Captain Bridewell, I am no longer prepared to discuss this. I expect you and all your crew to be on board in thirteen minutes. After that I'll order the Orion turned loose and anyone still on board her can take their chances. Without the protection of our shields I doubt they'll last long." Alverez snapped the channel closed with a vicious twist of his hand and stalked up to the command station. 

Bridewell was a stubborn young fool who had been in space for half the time he had, Alverez told himself. It was bad enough he should use his connections to advance his career, but now he'd come close to killing the lot of them. Well, with any luck Bridewell would be stubborn enough to pick up the gauntlet Alverez had thrown him. Let the young fool stay with his command, they'd all be better off that way. 

*

Mos Eisley's tiny body seemed inconsequential, surrounded by huge machines on every side. Yet in reality he made those machines more than just a tired collection of spaceship parts. To him they were work of art, living beings to be coaxed, nursed and encouraged through every trial. 

The entire ship was shaking like a fever victim. Mos had been in space long enough to know the effects a hyperspace jump gone wrong had in an engine room. Most engineers with that kind of knowledge would have been running for the door about now, but Mos had weathered enough to know that after that, there would be no where else to go. 

When the cooling duct to the hyperdrive coils blew out, the room filled with sub-zero gas in an instant. Mos choked and pressed the fabric of his robes to his mouth and nose. With luck, the coolant would reach a breathable temperature before it hit his lungs. 

A gesture brought his repulsor-lift droid sailing out the gas clouds, a layer of frost plastered over its metallic casing. The droid gracefully sank to the ground where its master sprang onto the machine's back. 

"Up, up." Mos commanded, rapping his toes on the droid's bug like head. 

The droid hesitated, as though steeling itself for the task. Then laboriously it rose into the air, its repulsor lift engines wheezing under the strain. Quickly, Mos reached out for the cut-off valve and silenced the screaming jet of coolant. 

The ship was soundless. Mos feared that the abrupt cold had burst his eardrums. Then, gradually, the cries of his precious engines became audible. 

They were keening like tortured birds of prey and on the side of the room where the drives could be accessed the frost from the escaping gases had already evaporated. Without an efficient heat exchanger the hyperdrive coils would reach melting point in seconds. 

As they turned to liquid they would loose conductivity and the power flooding in from the reactor would find it had no where to go. That would drive their temperature up to the flash point, where they would vaporize, taking most of the ship with them. 

There was an automatic fail-safe designed to shut the engines down before that happened, but Mos had spent the last two days going over the ship's systems and he had his doubts about whether it would work. Even if it did, the full throttle roar of the engines and the roll and heave of the deck told him they needed every ounce of thrust the sub-light drives could put out. 

Mos bit his lip in thought. Outwardly he appeared quite calm, but another of his own kind would had detected the subtle shifts in posture that signalled intense pressure. 

Giving a decisive nod, Mos crouched down and rapped the droid on the top of the head to get its attention. "Engineering station." he ordered. The droid swiftly obeyed, gliding across the turbulent engine room.

"Down, down." the engineer commanded, reaching for the controls. 

Mos's stubby fingers whirred over the work station, moving feverishly as he tried to finish what he was doing before the fail-safe was triggered. That the drives' howls hadn't already gurgled to nothing was a sign of how badly maintained the Mendez was.

Mos hit the last key in the sequence and the engine room was filled with the sound of the heat exchanger going into reverse. That meant the room would soon be filled with superheated gas, but the engines would keep functioning for another few precious seconds. 

Before he had started working on the keyboard, Mos had begun going over the blue-prints of the ship's engines in his mind. He only had a few moments to think of a solution to the problem. If he wasn't smart enough to jury-rig his way out of it, his lack of insight would kill him. 

The robe's fabric fell away from the jawa's face and he realised that the air had gone from painfully cold to almost scortching to breath. How long had passed since the hyperdrive cooling system blew? Two, perhaps three seconds? For Mos, a jawa born and bred between the hammer of twin suns and the anvil of the Tatooine desert, this level of heat was not a problem. But how long had passed since the hyperdrive cooling system blew? Two, perhaps three seconds? That gave him perhaps a minute before his flesh started to cook on his bones. The realisation brought a sudden awareness that the metal droid casing was burning his feet. 

Hitting the controls on the engineering station with out even looking at them, Mos Isley, exile, jawa, engineer and last hope for a dying spaceship, began to give his droid instructions for the last time. 

*

Kelly reached out with the force, picturing it as a cool, peaceful, blue aroura that billowed around him like an ocean wind. As he struggled to hold his focus a second image came to mind, an image of boiling mud and magma welling up inside him. He knew instantly that it represented the terror and the shame he felt for bringing them to this terrible, futile, anihalation. 

The writhing black and red spread out from Kelly and threatened to fill the blue and white like a cancer overwhelming a healthy organ. The blue and white seemed to withdraw from the red and black, thinning as it did so. Then it constricted around like a fist, crushing the dark side into a tightly compressed ball of emotion that seemed, for a moment, to be on the brink of dissappearing. 

Kelly seemed removed from the noise, smoke and heat of the flight deck. The frantic babble of his comrades had become a remote white noise that seemed no more important than the sound of a river on a stroll through the countryside. Then the ship shuddered around them, the babble suddenly ceased and Kelly felt his body become very, very light. Wieghtless, in fact. 

They were free falling. 

Into a sun. 

*


	6. Keeping your back to the sun

**The Jedi Purge**

**Chapter Six**

**Keeping Your Back to the Sun**

It surprised Mos when the ship went into free fall, even though he was the one who had shut down the engines. The artificial gravity should have kept them at one gee whether they were drifting aimlessly through deep space or in a full throttle crash dive towards a planet. Instead, Moss felt his feet leave the back of his droid and his heart rise into his mouth. 

The coolant from the hyperdrive's heat exchanger was still screaming into the room. Moss spared the leak a glance and noticed that the actual conduit to the drive itself seemed to be intact- he could see the pipe quite clearly, even through a heat haze that made the straight lines of the ducting seem as twisted as a child's drawing. 

About a metre from the pipe a plume of incandescent light blasted across the engineering bay. It was shaped like the flame of a welding torch up to the point where it hit the far wall with a banshee scream. Mos saw that the deck plates were bubbling under the intense heat and found time to be amazed that he had survived this long before looking away.

He had done all he could. 

The floor was white hot and it was four metres to the door. Kicking his legs against the top of his droid, Mos aimed for the door hoping to clear it while the ship was still in zero gravity. In a heartbeat or two the back up system would cut in and plaster him to the floor as if he was a meat patty on a cooking griddle. 

Mos had no gods to prey to. He remembered his home. The cool darkness of the underground cave systems. The burning heat of the rocky deserts. The council of his peers standing silently around him. The shame in his father's yellow eye lights. 

The back up for the artificial gravity cut in. To Mos it was if nothing had happened for an instant. He was still weightless. The floor bucked towards him like a beast throwing a rider. The side of his right hand hit the floor first and Mos felt the crack of his wrist breaking under the impact before the searing pain of the floor branding the palm of his hand reached his mind. 

The Jawa's scream was almost loud enough to be audible over the sound of the hyperdrive coolant destroying the engine room. 

As he screamed, Mos put his head back as far as it would go and saw the blast shutter coming down from overhead. He was on the wrong side of it. He tried to scramble towards it and realised that his hands were stuck to the floor. He tore them free and, rather than put the bare skin to metal again, rolled head over heels under the lowering shutter. 

Laying on the ice cold metal grating outside the engine room, Moss looked through the narrowing gap between floor and blast shutter. The last thing he saw before the shutter closed was his repulsor lift droid silhouetted in the light from the leaking plasma as it carried out it's final instructions. Then the room was sealed and Mos was left panting and shivering in what his battered senses told him was a pitch black, silent and ice-cold corridor. 

*

Kelly felt like he had just woken up for the first time. If the ship died then he would die with it and the darkness that had threatened, momentarily, to overwhelm him would also be destroyed. It was a simple thought, yet it had a transforming quality. If the good was destroyed, the bad would be also. And the bad was selfish. It didn't want to be destroyed. So this time, at least, the bad would work with the good. 

In his Jedi trance, Kelly saw the blue and white cloud of light he had used to represent the light side of the force ripple as it merged with the dark side. It was like watching oil burn on troubled waters. And as he had done once before, Kelly watched as images took shape in the turmoil of the light and darkness. Ghosts from the past and phantoms from the future stalked across his mind's eye, some shrieking, some calm, others seemingly aware of Kelly's unblinking, frozen mental gaze.

Amongst the many scenes that were being played out in front of Kelly was one he recognised. He watched like a spectator as his old mentor, now dead, guided the younger version of himself through a far-seeing exercise. 

"The future is always moving, like some great rolling ocean stretching out in front of us. Which makes it difficult to see because one vision is constantly cutting off our view of the next, as though we were only kept afloat by a life jacket in a mighty storm and one wave were blocking our view of the next. To see any part of it clearly, we must move with it." 

The memory, if that was what the vision was, sank back into the melee of past, future and present. From the crowd of figures in the middle distance, a face rose up from the past until it was so close that filled Kelly's vision. It was Dan Avilard, the friend and mentor Kelly had not yet even begun to mourn. His eyes were glassy, which they had never been in life, and he was wrapped in a misty halo formed from his dying breath. Gently his old master admonished him to look to what could be changed, not what was done and set forever. 

Yes. That was good advice. He turned his mind's eye away from his old teacher looking for the future. Preferably a future in which he and the others played an active roll...

There was the present. 

Captain Vath, lying on his back on the floor of the flight deck, blood running down his jaw from where his teeth had bitten and still were biting through his lower lip. Kelly thought it would be a good idea if Vath stopped doing that, but with both legs now sending screams of pain through the man's body, it seemed unlikely. Kelly mentally suggested that Vath let consciousness slip away and then, as an after thought, gave the muscles on one side of Vath's neck a nudge so that the injured man's head lolled to one side and he couldn't swallow his tongue. 

There was Chainy, blood bubbling with adrenaline, heart pounding fit to seize up and kill him ahead of everyone else on board. Typical of the man; always trying to get somewhere ahead of schedule. His hands were locked around the controls in a death grip, his mind hypnotised by it's greatest fear: being at the helm of a dead ship.

 _It's going to be all right,_ Kelly's thoughts whispered to the back of the pilot's mind before turning to the bounty hunter. 

Still, resolute and unbreakable. Petri's silent, shape seemed to have a reassuring weight. It was like a great rock in a storm tossed ocean. He lay on his back in the main corridor, the soles of his boots charred from intense heat and the paint on his armour cracked and flaked. 

Kelly remembered that the bounty hunter had been in the ventricle gunnery bay when the ship went through hyperspace, the most exposed place possible. True, his armour provided more protection than anyone else on board had, but Kelly realised with a sudden sadness that even if they survived this disaster the radiation they had already absorbed might still kill them weeks, months or years from now. Kelly felt cheated and, sensing tears run down Petri's face under the helmet, knew that the bounty hunter did too. 

Kelly left Petri lying next to the gunnery bay hatch and moved on.

Moss was face down by the door to the engine room, thin curls of smoke rising from his robes. Kelly could feel the pain from vicious wounds to the Jawa's face, hands and feet. No wonder Mos had wrapped himself in a blanket of unconsciousness. Still, the Jedi had to know how bad things were and he didn't know enough about engines to find out for himself. Gently, he probed the Jawa's mind. 

Mos had hidden himself in a dream of his past, a memory so painful that the distant agony of his real body could be mistaken for the shame and anger that belonged to this place and time. He stood before the glowing eyes of seven of his peers, who had been brought to this place by their elders without knowing why. Each Jawa stood at the edge of a small, perfectly circular pond formed by the dripping of water from a huge stalactite that hung above the dead centre of the pond. 

Kelly found himself standing in the Jawa's place and, for a moment, almost forgot who he was. The sight of seven Jawas standing as tall as him shocked Kelly back into his own perspective and he was standing behind Mos, looking down into the still black waters just as the engineer was. 

Uncertain how to tell the Jawa he was there, Kelly hesitated. Before he could make a decision the dreamer let out a long sigh. 

"Have they brought you to judge me, too?" 

The Jawa's voice was slow and slurred, but for once Kelly could understand it as though he were speaking himself. "No," Kelly told him and stopped, surprised by the silence of his own voice. Apparently the act of wanting to tell Mos something and the act of telling him was one and the same here, just as it was in a Jedi thought link. "No," Kelly repeated, choosing his signals more carefully. "I came here for other reasons."

"Yet you are here. You are here and my disgrace is complete." Mos's voice was sleepy and tired, not unlike someone in the real world might be if they were on the verge of falling asleep. As he spoke, the Jawa rocked his head back and forth and hugged himself, wrapping his arms around his chest. 

"I will never speak of it." Kelly promised after a moment's thought. It wasn't much of a promise, he reflected bitterly. He had understood almost nothing he had seen here and cared about even less; had he wished to scream the Jawa's secrets at the top of his lungs the only people who could have heard him would likely be dead in a few moments. 

"Why do you come here?" Mos asked.

"To save us all."

"To see and be seen. To judge and be just. To pass sentence."

Kelly found himself swaying to the sound of the ritual responses. As one Jawa began the second phrase of the ritual response, the second began the began the first phrase, until the whole chamber rang with voices that, in Moss's mind, did not sound in the least high or raspy. Kelly's head rang. He couldn't tell if the heat that was searing him was from Moss's memory of Tatooine or the sun that was burning him alive. 

"Mos, I have to know what we're facing." 

The vision of the dark cave and burning eyes was replaced by a bright but featureless desert that seemed to stretch out forever. Mos was standing beside him, shoulder to shoulder. "This is what I face. Alone. To be dried to dust and scattered on the desert winds."

"You are not alone."

"But that is what I am. My name was taken from me."

"Your name is Mos." 

"No." The Jawa stretched out a wiry, coarse haired arm. "There is Mos."

Kelly saw the desert stretch like elastic. A small city with buildings that seemed to be made for giants wavered before him in the heat haze. "It's spaceport." Kelly said out loud. 

"Names are for telling how someone fits with the people around them. When there is no where for you to fit, you have no need of a name." 

"You mean you chose a name?"

"No. My choice was life or death. I chose life." 

"You're choosing death for all of us, right now, if I don't know how bad the engines are!"

The Jawa turned and looked him straight in the face with eyes that looked unnaturally like the twin suns that were blazing relentlessly above. The desert grew dark around them. When Mos blinked the last trace of light was extinguished and Kelly fell to the ground as all the pain and terror from the engineer's ordeal flooded him, along with the Jawa's memories. 

*

There was no time.

"We can't last any longer! The hull is cracking!" 

The voice was harsh and faint as if someone a long way distant was shouting. Kelly saw the cockpit as another vision, dim and far away. 

Chainy was shouting. His face was turned over his shoulder, towards Kelly or away from the hideous light of the sun. 

There was a roaring outside the ship. The hiss and snap of burning electronics was all around. 

There's no time.

Kelly knew they had a few breaths of life left. He tried to shake his head to throw off the sense of disorientation and seemed to watch from a distance as the vision of him on the flight deck lolled like a meat puppet. 

Even if Kelly could speak, he wouldn't be heard. Frustration exploded from every pore of his body and suddenly the situation became very clear to him. The ship, the sun, the forces that compelled the two to meet were crystal images in his mind's eye. He didn't have to speak. 

Kelly thought of Chainy, then pushed the knowledge into the pilot's mind. 

There's no time...

The vision snapped into focus. 

...like the present, Kelly thought. 

*

The smell of burning, of grease, of hot metal and pure terror was so deep in Kelly's throat it was as if a living thing had forced it's way into his body and was trying to crawl deeper. Flashes of light too bright and quick to really exist were dancing across his vision. Kelly reeled with the knowledge that each firework was a cosmic ray tearing through his optic nerve. 

The flight deck canopy was too bright to look at for more than a second at a time. Kelly blinked tears away and saw rivers of light run down the transparent alloy as the polarized silicon layer melted. Chainy's face was still turned away from the canopy, or towards Kelly. The hellish light cast shadows so dark, they left Chainy's expression as invisible as the dark side. 

"The engines are coming back on line. About six seconds from now. They'll be good for three quarters throttle for about one hundred eighty seconds top. No more." 

Kelly combined hiding his eyes from the glare with a nod and hoped that Chainy would understand. A moment later the ship seemed to accelerate faster than anything Kelly had ever felt before. His neck snapped back and the skin was drawn tight across his face. 

The roaring outside the ship grew louder. Surely there was no way they could survive this. 

Everything went black. It took Kelly a good five seconds to realise it was because their backs were to the sun. The next miracle would be keeping things that way.

*

The last crew member of the Orion stumbled through the airlock. As one of the Leopard's crewmen helped him away, Captain Bridewell surveyed the remains of his command bitterly. Alvere had destroyed him. There was no way out of this. 

The Ordian Stella Guard was withering like fruit on a dying tree. No new ships had been commissioned for decade and there was open talk of imperial forces taking over the customs duties. At thirty-two he had too many ties to Ordia to transfer to any other service. He would never command another military ship. 

There was nothing for him now that old fool had done this. 

Bridewell slammed a fist against a wall. He wanted to grab a blaster and storm the bridge but something deep inside held him back. The knowledge that he would be shot down and that nothing would give Alvere greater pleasure. Still the fury burned him. 

The Orion was a good ship. With a few hours it could be ready to move on it's own power. 

Captain Bridewell was a man of action. He had to do something.

*

The gunmetal grey iris closed. There was a heavy mechanical sound of the Leopard releasing it's docking clamps and pushing away from the crippled ship. 

Captain Alvere was going from one bridge station to another silently damning himself for replacing three bridge officers during a crisis. He had held them at their stations until the Orion was docked, then had their replacements relieve the injured, incompetent and hysterical officers Alvere couldn't use. 

There were twenty three crew on the ship. Two shifts of six bridge officers, three engineering crew who's hours rotated so there were always two on duty, seven boarding crew who also manned the gunnery stations and kept everything well oiled and one captain. The three replacement officers would have been woken when the target ship dropped out of hyperspace and Bridewell had signalled to prepare to engage. Alvere glared into the faces of the replacement crew. When he saw no trace of sleep he turned away. Replacing officers during a crisis would get questions asked at the enquiry. And there would be an enquiry, Alvere knew.

The bridge veiwports were pitch black. An armoured screen had covered them from the outside.

"Captain, the Orion is loose within our deflector shields." 

"On the word, engines to five percent, course zero mark zero. Shields down for point three seconds. No longer. Full power to the aft deflectors when they come back on." 

Alvere took position, over-looking the rest of the bridge crew. He wondered how long he would shake and sweat after this was over. If it didn't work his career would be over, perhaps his life. If it did work, he would have a fighting chance to keep both intact. He set his jaw.

"Now." 

*

The first thing Petri became aware of was the smell of burning. That brought back the memory of the gunnery bay. He remembered the insulation on the ladder bars melting and coming away on his hands as he scrambled for safety. Pain was the second thing Petri became aware of. 

It wasn't fair, he thought to himself. He waited for the blaze of anger that usually followed the thought, ready to welcome the strength it would bring. Nothing happened. It wasn't fair and he was too far gone to care. That meant he was probably going to die. There had been other times in his life when he had felt this way and pulled through anyway but never during a job. This was where someone put a blaster to his head and turned him into a stain on the pavement. 

There was a brief moment of darkness, no more than a blink of the mind's eye. When it ended, Petri was still lying on the corridor floor, which was no more stained than it had been before. His mind was clear enough to know that there would be no vicious kick to the ribs or circle of cold metal pressed behind his ear. He knew where he was. 

"Oh shit." 

On the flight deck Chainy had began to babble hysterically. The air reeked of urine but Kelly wasn't going to say anything until he was sure it was someone else's fault. Captain Vath, laying on the floor, moaned slightly. He had missed the nearly the whole thing. Kelly envied him. 

"Did you see that? We're alive. And the ship didn't come apart. I did it. Skill like you wouldn't believe. Let's see that pretty boy, Solo, beat that! He'll never wrestle a sun for his ship and come away to boast about it!" 

Perhaps he's so good that he wouldn't get into a situation like that? Kelly thought the question but said nothing. The cockpit was full of words already, all of them Chainy's, and Kelly was fighting the urge to throw up.

"We've danced with solar flares and beaten flames hotter than hell itself! There's nothing in creation we can't beat now!" 

How about cancer? Or the urge to throw up, Kelly noted as he emptied his stomach contents over the legs of the still unconscious Captain.

"They're going to make holovision shows about us!" 

"Where are we going?" Kelly found the self-control to ask.

"Who cares? We made it!"

"I care, damnit!" Kelly shrieked. 

A brief silence followed. Kelly ran a shaking hand through his hair and tried to remember what it normally felt like to be a Jedi. Every time he blinked he thought he saw a flash of light that signalled a cosmic ray crossing his retina. He drew a long breath.

"Sorry." Chainy told him. "I guess I was a little hyper for a moment there." The pilot looked over his shoulder and gave a nervous grin. 

"Just tell me where we're headed."

"At the moment I'm just keeping our backs to the sun. That's going to last until the manoeuvring thrusters give out. We were moving pretty fast when that star got in the way, even without it's gravity pulling us in. I couldn't reverse course, not with what we had left. I had put it all in to moving us sideways so we could slide past it." 

"Have we got escape velocity?" Kelly asked.

"For the system? No. We'll be an artificial comet with one hell of a long orbit. A couple of centuries, at least." 

There was a long pause. Kelly found himself smiling. "We won't care by then." 

Chainy managed a weak laugh but didn't say anything.

Some time went by before either of the men spoke again. The breathing of the men on the flight deck was the only sound Kelly could hear on the ship. When he looked at the wheezing injured man on the floor Kelly realised that his own hands were shaking uncontrollably. He tried to control the shaking and found that made it worse. The memory of his teacher telling him to begin, build on and finish with control surfaced briefly but Kelly could not hold onto even that thought for more than two seconds. 

"I'm going to check on the others." Kelly said and then left before Chainy could turn round and see how frightened Kelly was. 

Kelly found Petri sitting with his back propped up against a wall, unconscious and with a blaster pistol in his lap. There was no way to tell whether suicide or murder had been on his mind. After carefully removing pieces of armour that were still hot to the touch Kelly checked the bounty hunter's pulse and breathing. The man would live for now, at least. 

Kelly left the weapon lying where it was. There was no point in removing it without confiscating all the bounty hunter's weapons and Kelly couldn't face that right now. Petri probably had some hidden weapons Kelly didn't even know about. Instead, Kelly stumbled deeper into the ship, trying to remember where he had seen the Jawa in the vision they had shared. 

Closer to the engine room the corridor lights were dead. Kelly paused. It was dangerous to wander blindly around a crippled starship; even the things it was normally safe to walk into might be red hot, or electrified. If he entered a bad section he might not be able to find his way out again. There should have been a utility locker somewhere near by, marked with luminous paint. Kelly found it but he wasn't surprised when it turned out to be empty except for a bottle of Corellian rum. 

Kelly walked into the darkness. He knew when he had found Mos Isley because Kelly had smelt seared flesh before.

*

Twenty hours later, they had the shields up and running. Chainy had insisted on shutting down the manoeuvring thrusters because they weren't meant for constant use. Without down time they might burn out and leave them with no way of controlling the ship. The reactor had survived the whole thing surprisingly well. They had power but the ducting to distribute it had failed in a dozen places. One shield generator was ruined but the dorsal generator had been saved when the ducting leading to it had failed. They replaced the ducting with some that had run to the ventricle gunnery bay, which would never be used again. The life support was shaky but serviceable. The sensors had melted and were probably now a cloud of ionised gas back in the sun's corona. 

Everyone had taken twice the maximum recommended dose of post-irradiation drugs. Reactive drugs to bond with ions and isotopes. Anti-cancer vaccines. Drugs to stop them becoming delusional. Drugs to stop their organs swelling from internal radiation burns. Drugs to help their DNA repair itself. Everyone took the medication together, silently, each nursing their own doubts about whether it would be enough, about whether they would be able to get to a place that could and would treat them when it wasn't enough and about whether they would be able to stay alive long enough to find out which particular cancer was going to kill them. 

"If we use the thrusters until they burn out and we give them regular rests, then we can build up enough speed to get out of this solar system." Chainy told them. The tone of his voice was more ironic than anything else.

"How long would that take?" Perti asked. He didn't ask how long it would take to get anywhere. 

"About three years." Chainy took a mouth-full of tinned rouh from the rations. "I could put together a light-speed transmitter out of spare parts. Send an emergency signal." 

"How long would that take to reach someone?" Kelly asked.

"Only two and half years. We aren't that far from the trade route we were on." Chainy spooned another helping of the round, white beans into his mouth. "Of course, it would probably be a trade ship that picked up the signal, so they would just relay it. Then an Imperial customs ship would come out, realise who we are and probably just kill us." 

"How long would it take to build a subspace radio so we can talk to someone we do want to come and rescue us?" Kelly prompted.

"I don't know. I've never tried it. I know this, without the antenna on the outside of the ship we aren't going to get a signal very far. A light-year at most." 

"We'll try that first then." Petri decided. 

Chainy looked at Kelly but the Jedi was staring at the floor and said nothing. Neither did anyone else. 

*

Mos Isley was naked. He lay on a repulsor bed in what passed for the ship's medical bay; a two bunk sleeping quarters that the others had stuffed everything medical they could find into. There was a hand held scanner pack monitoring his vital signs and a bacta gel-pack on his back where he had rolled across the red-hot floor. Both his hands were sealed in plastic globes in which nutrients bathed them and took away the pain. He was helpless, unable to touch even the bed beneath him with any part of his body. He could barely bring himself to think. Instead, he just lay there counting the inhalations and exhalations of the respirator that was doing the work of his scorched and now fluid filled lungs. He might breath again with his own pair, if they could find the money from somewhere and a place that knew one Jawa internal organ from another. 

Chainy had come in asking questions about subspace radio. Mos couldn't answer them. He knew the answers; he just couldn't speak or use the data pad Chainy offered him. Even his toes were bandaged in field dressings. After a while the pilot had offered some vague reassurance that neither of them believed, then left to begin work on his transmitter. Mos hoped he would recover enough to help before the human made a mess of it. 

The respirator kept wheezing to itself. Mos fought down the urge to overhaul it, knowing he was helpless. 

*

To be continued…


End file.
